Category: Sermons
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Paul [Troublemakers]
But it’s also important to consider the invitation Jesus issues to those who do have power. Because sometimes that’s us, and we need to be able to recall these stories when opportunity knocks on our door – when our invitation comes. And that invitation is to a good betrayal.
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Naomi [Troublemakers]
I wanted to condense her into a single lesson for a single sermon. My instinct was to reduce Naomi into something bite-sized. But she refuses to be reduced. She’s not a paragon of faith without doubts or even of moral purity. The Davidic royal line is not a story of moral purity either. Along the…
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Solidarity Embrittles Empire
Empire was watching on that day, two thousand years ago, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem under a banner of peace. And empire is still watching today. This Palm Sunday is another theatrical call to us. Our times are not easy – and they never are.
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In Case of Abundance
That was the leavening of love, or maybe the mathematics of the divine. Like a net, we are as strong as what we choose to weave together. And the consistency of this community fabric is not in its thread count, not in our numbers, but in our strength and our daring love.
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Nonetheless
How we heal is how we choose to live. If captivity has not yet ended, then we must figure out how to be liberated anyway. How to liberate one another anyway.
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A Facilitated Grief Exercise
But Scripture and examples from around the world show that grieving is not faithlessness. We can be emotionally honest about what it means to be human and still faithfully love our Creator and neighbor. And grieving is not ingratitude. We can be grateful for what we have and still grieve what we have lost.
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Covenants for an Apocalypse
The word “apocalypse” comes from the Greek word “apokaluptein,” which means “to uncover or reveal.” And whether we’re ready to accept what we find, these days have uncovered and revealed us.
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Is God Happy When we Suffer?
It’s easy for us to believe that God wants us to suffer if we learned that the suffering we experienced was for our own good. Especially if our own suffering came at the hands of those who instilled our morals in us: our family, our religious leaders, or our government, for example.
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Damn The Ghost Fences
Even in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, queer love is steeped in high drama. We can never just get a queer fairy tale or rom com, can we? But such are most of our holy books, a collection of tellings and writings about peoples in unexpected, queer, transgressive, courageous relationship with the Divine.
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What I Do Know
In this time when we are both afraid and courageous, both closer to death and acutely alive, the choice about how we are going to respond – how we are going to face this specter together – is in our hands. Are we going to uphold the status quo and give in to despair? Or…
Ophelia Hu Kinney 