Sermons from the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer

You Are Loved - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

If we pay attention to Jesus fully and we pay attention
to the first generation of Jesus followers, we understand that to pick up our
cross and to follow Jesus is not to follow Jesus out by ourselves into the
wilderness all alone. It is to follow Jesus deep into the heart of community
where we are meant to live our lives, building relationships of love. To love
one another the way we are loved. To create a space where people can know even
an inch, a smidge, just an iota of what it means to be loved
unconditionally because we experience it with one another.
We have the audacity to think that that's not radical? What is more radical in this world than to create a space for people where they
are told and then they are able to experience true belonging, unconditional?
You and I are not conditioned to believe that it's true.
This life does not train us to believe that we are loved like that. We are over
and over again taught the message that our value in this world is
based on our performance. That how much we are loved will be based on what we
bring to the table.
We are told this. by our culture. We are told this by our
work. We are told this sometimes even in our families and in our friend
circles. We have built communities, many of which are very wonderful, that are
based on all sorts of things. Are they based on complete and utter belonging
and belovedness?

Specs of Glitter - The Rev. Melanie W. J. Slane

This week, my boys collectively convened at the kitchen table to discuss a lesson that they had both had in their first and third grade classes. And my ears perked up as I heard little Arlo say, And that's how the world was made. My parental anxieties leapt from my skin. We do live in Ohio, after all.
What are you guys talking about in here? Oh, we're just talking about how the world was made. Intrigued, I pleaded, tell me more. Well, our teacher took a great big balloon and she shook it up and she passed it around and we all got to hold it and squish it and then she took it back and she popped it and glitter went flying everywhere.
And all the particles and atoms and stuff, well they're all over our classroom. And we'll be finding glitter for years. Did I mention I love school? Because they play with glitter there and not at my house.
I love that my children get to wonder and explore and expand their minds, their world views in this diverse environment of thought and experience. I really do love that the two creation narratives we find in the book of Genesis are not the only way that they will understand God's marvelous work in making this world.
I love that science and faith are not mutually exclusive in their minds. And I love that they get to see glitter everywhere.
Now, I don't know exactly what the opposite of glitter is, but I think I saw it this week, too.

In Your Infancy - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

I don't think that he was just doing a sort of a
performative act of false humility in front of us. 'Oh, I'm just very young.'
What I realized was that he was orienting himself in the truth of his infancy in God's eyes, because for him, that was a proper perspective on how to
approach the whole conversation of his relationship with God.
You, right now, as you are, imagine for a moment that you
are, in fact, only in your infancy when it comes to your understanding of the
power of God's love in your life and the power of God's love in the life of
this creation. Many of us, I'm only 44, and I already am starting to do the
thing where I'm like, I don't want to learn that thing.
Like, cars without drivers, I hope I die before it happens. I'm down in my 40s, and I'm already picking the things that I
don't want to learn. And so many of you were like, 'I'll never get
online,' and then the pandemic happened and you're said, fine I'll learn Zoom, but you don't really want to.
We're already saying, I've learned enough, I'm old
enough, I've gotten far enough. I'm done, I'd like to kind of coast a little
bit. And yet wherever you are in your life, whatever age you are, however,
close you are to the end of your life on this Earth, you are still in your
infancy when it comes to learning the power, the magnificence of God's love.

The Real You - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

"As a child, you might remember, I know I do, your parents, the way they'd be when company was around, making sure the house looked appropriate for people to see. 'They don't want to know how we really live.' You'd remember this. You'd remember the shift.Sometimes their voices would change when others were around. And then they'd leave and their energy would shift completely. You've probably seen this and you even remember as you got older, maybe your first job, how everyone was the first week or two weeks or how you felt and how you acted. You have this idea you want to put your best foot forward, and so does the company. After a few weeks, a few months all of a sudden, people start to see how the place really works, and how they really fit in...Oftentimes we might even measure who our closest friends and loved ones are by the fact that we were able to be ourselves with them more quickly. You know, this feeling there is a, there's a fear of being yourself that we all experience. There's a mask we are accustomed to placing upon ourselves. Some of it is just for common courtesy and decorum, but some of it is because we're scared of what people will see."

Inseparable - The Rev. Melanie W. J. Slane

As humans, we are constantly making choices that require
separation. We cannot have everything, so we are forced to choose. We cannot do
everything, and so when we do anything, we must decide not to do something
else.
The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur once wrote, Ugh, if only
I could grasp and embrace everything. And how cruel it is to choose and to
exclude. And, of course, sometimes life chooses for us. No one would choose to
grow up and become an adult. And yet, here we are. No one would choose to have
their children leave home, and yet... There they go.
At the very heart of what it means to be human is the
inevitable separation from the things and people that we love most in this
world. Life is hard. Distress, and hunger, and suffering, and being laid bare
in all of our weaknesses. These are all a part of the human experience.
Suffering is for us. a predestined condition, and the Apostle Paul knew this
all too well. He himself enacted unimaginable suffering on some of the first
followers of Jesus Christ. He stood there and watched as Stephen was stoned to
death for proclaiming Jesus as the Son of the Living God.

Saved not Solved - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Paul's not trying to get us to be fixed. And he's trying to
get us out of the mentality that we are fixable. Or that Jesus came here to fix
us. To solve us. There is a difference between being solved and being saved.
There is a difference between being fixed and being loved.
God loves you. God lives for you, dies and lives again for
you. God saves us as we are, not fixes us so we can be savable. And those are
different things. Now many of us, many of us in this room, have been quite
successful at solving problems. And I want to say, there's a place for it. It's
not bad. Well, Phil told me today that problem solving is bad.
Now we got to solve problems, I get that. There's a bunch of
things we got to work on, I understand that. Us being ourselves is not a
problem to be solved though. And there are things that we cannot muscle our way
through. We cannot use our bodies and our minds so strongly and so perfectly
that finally we will be acceptable to God because we are already acceptable to
God, the God who loves us and is faithful to us. Thanks be to God in Jesus
Christ
To have a mind set in the flesh is a mind set in the belief
that you can use your body to make yourself perfect. And Paul says that leads
to death. Death, when you try to make yourself perfect in relationship with
others, when you try to make yourself perfect in relationship to God, when you
think you've just got to keep working or else you cannot love and be loved, you
are killing yourself, my friends.

Implications of Grace - The Rev. Gary Lubin

Concerned that people would not just see it as a free ride, but a joy ride, a license to sin. Not exactly. To Paul's way of thinking, saving grace has ethical implications. And to do that, to make that explanation, Paul uses the analogy of slavery. It's something that everyone in the Roman world could relate to.
One out of five folks in the Roman Empire were slaves. It was commonplace. Paul makes reference to it, like eight times in today's short reading. So, the Jewish contingent in the Roman Church would recall, of course, the exodus. Their escape from slavery in Egypt and the lessons learned while they wandered in the wilderness as lost souls, and then finding the promised land, the challenges, and the responsibilities of what it means to be free. Now, they would've certainly been relieved of not having to perfectly meet the law, the Old Testament Ten Commandments and all the many burdensome, oppressive, interpretive rules and regulations that went with it. They've been relieved greatly. But so that we don't get the wrong idea, The New Testament summary of the law to love God and love your neighbor as yourself well, that's not a cake walk either.
As a matter of fact, that may be even more difficult to comply with to meet as a goal. And that is because no one is perfect, and therein lies the conundrum of being a human. Paul reminds us therefore that grace is possible because of the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ.

YOLO - The Rev. Melanie W. J. Slane

Drowning didn't make me perfect, but I think it did maybe
make me a little bit better. I was more conscious of what was going on around
me, more thoughtful around water. I trained in CPR, the same thing that saved
my life and became a lifeguard, helping others to be safe in the water.
I didn't altogether throw out though the notion that you
only live once. YOLO is what the kids call it these days. I've heard this
phrase ad nauseam in our culture. Live life to the fullest. Take the trip, try
the thing, go out there. Spend all that money, just do it. And while I, I
understand the sentiment, Yolo, you only live once, I think our focus on Paul's
letter to the Romans today is asking us a deep and abiding question about
living. And about what we're living for. It asks us, are you just out there
living your best life so that you can have more than your neighbor? Is yolo
your excuse to spend your entire paycheck on a new car or a bigger house, or
the latest Chanel bag? We're all alive, thank God, but what are we living for?

God’s Trust - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

...she like flung herself backward and I was like, whoa. I
gotcha. that's where I saw God. I saw God in
her throwing herself in my arms.
I listed a couple other places that I'd seen God and then,
My spiritual director came back to that one and he asked me a question that
maybe some of you are asking or thinking as well, he said, so I assume in that
story you saw God in the way that you caught your daughter, like you saw God as
the one who catches you when you fall. Except that is not where I had seen God
in that story. I surprised myself because I was not trying to be thoughtful
or interesting, that's just not where I saw God. I said, no, I saw God in my
daughter throwing herself into my arms. It sounded a little bit like that.
That was a moment for me where my faith began to be
transformed because my understanding of what having faith began to change in
that realization. You and I spend so much of our spiritual thinking about how
we are supposed to be faithful. What kind of people are we supposed to be?

Perfect Faith - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

There's a man whose daughter has died, that's the height of desperation. He doesn't say he believes in Jesus. He doesn't say he's going to follow him. He doesn't say anything about faith. He just shows up and says, can you please do something? And Jesus doesn't say, well, here's what I'm going to need from you. I'm going to need you to follow the seven-point Faith Plan, and I need to see you grow in your discipleship, and then I'm going to see what I can do for you. No, he heals the daughter. And then the woman who's been bleeding for 12 years is in isolation. She's seen as untouchable and disconnected. She's afraid, she is alone, she is marginalized. And what is more desperate than, if I can just touch, as the old hymn goes, the hem of his garment, I believe I'll be made whole.
What's more desperate than, if I can just touch the tip of the robe, I might be okay. That's desperation. Desperation is faithful too. Can you be desperate? Can you bargain? Can you argue and shout? Can you bring your doubt and shout that at God? Can you take your anger and throw that in front of God as well?
Can you keep at it even when you're not sure if it matters? That's faithfulness.