The Arrow's Path

Here is my supply priest sermon I gave at St. Stephen's-Grand Island Proper 8, RCL Year A “The Gods Must Be Angry” Genesis 22:1-14 Psalm 13 Romans 6:12-23 Matthew 10:40-42 I was here earlier in the month, and I know some of you were not here at that time because it the weekend of the big rain and some of you were home pumping water out of your basements. I joked the week after when folks in my home parish asked me how my “supply priest” gig went, that I did not actually expect the town of Grand Island to actually live up to its name, but with all the water that weekend, I think you did. Perhaps it is fitting then that like the inexplicable deluge of rain we have had lately, the Sunday readings the past few weeks have included some Old Testament stories that have, likewise, included some seemingly inexplicable events. Last week, if you will recall, the Genesis story that was read involved a rather sordid affair between Abraham and Sarah, who had schemed up to a rather horrific idea ...

"God Will Hear" So...who wants a 45 minute sermon? Some Sundays, especially near the end of the year before Advent, even with three lectionary readings and a Psalm, whoever is preaching is sometimes scrambling to find something for a sermon topic. Today is not one of those days. In fact, today there were too many potential sermon topics given three very good readings from Genesis, Romans, and Matthew. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately depending on how you look at it), the Episcopal Church is typically not a denomination that looks favorably on 45-minute-plus sermons because we do not think either of the two parts of the Eucharist (the liturgy of the Word and the liturgy of the Sacrament) should overshadow the other. Only with a 45 minute sermon could you hope to cover to any degree the scope of the readings today, what with a great talk from Romans about the meaning of baptism from St. Paul that is read at the Easter vigil to the rather disturbing reading of Jesus saying,...

A Sermon by the Rev. Deacon Ryan Hall at St. Mark's on the Campus 5th Sunday of Easter, RCL Year A “A Simple Waiter” Acts 7:55-60 Psalm 31: 1-5, 15-16 1 Peter 2:2-10 John 14: 1-14 Anyone who has been on a family vacation or around groups of children for more than 5 seconds has probably been in the situation where a squabble breaks out, often between siblings. When queried by parents tired of traveling for several hours and hearing the children fuss, one of the children snaps, “Well, they started it!” Unfortunately, this sort of behavior is not confined to just children. I hear adults more and more these days behaving in such childish ways. In fact, it is one of the great ironies of life in modern America that on the one hand, we prize individuality (or rugged individualism as it is some times called) as highly as anything for nothing in our culture it sometimes seems is more important than the individual. Respect for the individual is not a bad thing, but the ironic other side of t...

Proper 10 Year C Deuteronomy 30:9-14 Psalm 25 Colossians 1:1-14 Gospel: Luke 10: 25-37 “Echoes of Shema” This will no doubt come as a shock to all of you, but most American church goers today are probably not all that thrilled about the themes in scriptures we have from the Lectionary. There's a;; this talk about “The Law” and “obedience” and perhaps even worse a story about Jesus arguing with a lawyer, and everyone knows how much Americans love lawyers. So, what are we to make of the lessons for today? What of this thing we call “The Law”? We in the Modern west hear the term “The Law” in a much more negative light than the original audience would have understood the term. “Law” to us usually means riles to be obeyed, dictated to us for, at least in theory, the common good. The Law is a list of things we can and cannot do because laws, at least in much of Western political theory, exist only as a negation of our freedom. Likewise, we Americans hear the term “obedience” in an even m...