Sermons from the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer

Plural, yet One - The Rev. Melanie W. J. Slane

In our reading from Genesis this morning, we meet them, the
original they, them, theirs. The one who was in the beginning before anything
else ever was. When the earth was a formless void the rush of a violent wind
swept forth from God and formed the land, water, and light and life were made,
and God was in all of it.
Speaking and seeing, and blessing and making and calling it
all very good. Before humans ever came into being, God was there. And billions
of years later, human beings began to tell one another what they thought God
was like. Some of the very first human writings that ever attempt to explain
God, still struggle to profess that God was a small and simple little thing.
How could God be that way? Have you seen how complicated and
beautiful this creation is? Even in Genesis, God is plural in form. Let us make
humankind in our own image, according to our likeness. So God created humankind
and God's own image in the image of God. They were created, male and female, God
created them. Plural, and yet one.

Our Story - Guest Speaker

Peter interpreted the events of that Pentecost in the light of his tradition and his experience of following Jesus, but not everyone welcomed the message, and it's not hard to see why. It meant that these devout people would have to significantly revise their ideas about what constituted faithfulness to their God.
We're not told what was spoken and heard in all those different languages. Only that it had something to do with God's deeds of power, that God was a powerful God They could accept. But the egalitarian and universal nature of this revelation was a lot to take on board. And what did that Galilean troublemaker Jesus have to do with anything?
How do we recognize the movement of the Holy Spirit and become a part of God's work in the world in our own day? Many of us, myself included, picked up our ideas about what it means to be Christian and about the Bible in our early years, explicitly from Sunday school or church school, or perhaps implicitly from the behavior and attitudes of our parents and grandparents. Yet, the day that we realized that we were never going to graduate from the School of Christian Learning was a blessed day indeed. In this lifelong endeavor of discipleship our Christian faith calls us to be ready to open our hearts and minds to the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. And from the vantage point of seven decades of life, I can tell you that this can be an uncomfortable experience. We know that society is changing very rapidly, and it can be tiring, even painful to be asked frequently to reexamine our assumptions. It may even feel like a betrayal of our heritage.

Left With Each Other - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

I think we've reached that point in the sermon where I talk about the frustrating thing, which is you'll notice we can't find Jesus anywhere.
Like, have you seen him lately, in person? We have all these stories today and we had this Feast of the Ascension on Thursday, and we have these stories today of Jesus disappearing. He's here one minute and he says, I'm here with you forever. I got you. And then he disappears. Whoa, wait a minute, right? I'm no longer going to be here in the way that I was, Jesus says, and then they ask, "what are you talking about?" And then the worst thing happens. They look back down and all they have is each other.
Right, oh, I'm left with you, thanks, God. And this is how we act sometimes, that we'd love to have Jesus present in real and practical ways, but I guess we'll have each other as a great consolation prize. You are not a consolation prize, my friends. This is not God's consolation.

Sunday Sermon: Suffering and Hope - The Rev. Melanie W. J. Slane

For those of you who have not yet discovered the card selection at your local Dollar Tree, I entreat you to make a trip. You are sure to see both suffering and hope in the midst of everyday life in that place.
A few years back, I made a small pilgrimage to my local Dollar Tree to get my Mother's Day cards, and I of course picked up a few other things on my way to the register. Satin ribbon for gift wrapping, my favorite reusable washcloths with the mesh on the one side. Some hair ties, duct tape, poster board for a school project and a pack of double-mint gum just for good measure.
I was next in line as I stared down the slow-moving conveyor belt toward a small stack of grocery items that the man in front of me was purchasing for his household. You'd be surprised at the good stuff you can find in that back left corner of the dollar tree across from the glassware.
As I dug into the bottom of my bag for my wallet, I looked up and caught a glimpse of the woman working the register. Something was off.

Sad Songs - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Do I like being sad? No, not really. Nobody likes being sad,
right? We all prefer if we could just be happy and joyful and not experience
any sorrow. We know that we don't want to suffer at all. Sad songs don't
actually make you sad, okay? Sad songs are wonderful because they allow you a
space for your sadness that already exists. It allows a place for your sadness
to be.
One of the things that happens with us when we're suffering,
when we're in pain, when we're in sorrow, is we turn sort of inward and we feel
like we're all alone. There's a deep loneliness in being sad. There's this
sense that there's just us, there's nobody else, no one, and we've all had this
riff, like no one has ever felt the way that I feel right now.
I feel that like once a week, but you can't listen to music
and feel that way because you can say, oh, I'm not the only one. And then you
hear a song that sings this, and you go, oh, I'm not alone in it. I'm not the
only one who's ever felt this way. I am not alone. I think that's a great gift.
I think it's a great gift for us when we are suffering, when we are sad, when
we are overcome, it is a great gift for us to be reminded that we are not the
only ones who have ever felt this way.

The Family Business - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

I feel like that's a lot of the ways that people see the
family business of Christianity today, of the Church of God's work. It's
something that we think is kind of interesting and cool. So maybe kind of,
well, definitely not cool. No one ever says the church is cool, but sort of
like, you know, interesting and like, oh, this thing that we're a part of, I
know we've got these customs and we're going to get these kids baptized.
It's just a thing that you do. It's part of our family, but
that's not the family business that Jesus is about. That is not what it means
to be part of God's family to call God Father to call Jesus brother. Jesus, from
before the foundations of the world, is destined to love this world and bring
healing and reconciliation; to care for this world, to bind up the
brokenhearted, to save people, and to liberate people.
And now you are in the family business. If you are baptized,
that is now your job too. Baptism isn't just about what happens to you in this
little moment or some joyous moment that you forget in the life of the church.
It's about the rest of your life. Baptism isn't about where you get to go when
you die.
Baptism is about who you are when you live and what you are
about. You are about the family business. You are the body of Christ. You. I'm
looking at God's daughters and sons right now. And what is Christ's work in the
world? To love it deeply from the heart, to change this world, to make it more
just and equitable, to create a world that is meaningfully and truthfully and
practically better than it was when we got here.

Raise Your Expectations - The Rev. Melanie W. J. Slane

What we look to as a Christian community is hope and joy.
Hope being the foundation of belief in resurrection. The belief that something
dead and lost and broken can live and be found healed and restored and renewed.
This is not just about being the kind of people who see a glass half full. It's
about pressing forward in desert places, confident that water will be there for
you when you need it most.
Believing in resurrection, it's about being
counter-cultural. Not getting swept up in the 24 hour news cycle that obsesses
over destruction and violence that promotes rightness over righteousness and
upholds a system of punitive retribution rather than restorative justice. Cynicism
tells us that people will always choose their own self-interests, but hope
tells us that there are those who would lay down their life for one's friends
like Jesus did.
We are not talking about a shallow optimism. It's so much
bigger than that. What we are talking about is a radical kind of love that
insists that we be in reconciled relationship with God and neighbor, and that
this sort of reconciliation is the ultimate kind of joy and always to be the thing
that we seek.

Jesus Movement - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

When that stone rolls away and they see that Jesus is already
gone because he is already alive and out in the world again, doing the work. It
is not just that their friend has been raised up. It is that the movement that
Jesus began is not dead. The movement of creating a world where all people know
that they belong and are beloved. They have a place creating a world where
it's true.
The movement towards that is not dead because Jesus is
not dead. They belong. You belong. And I belong because of what Jesus has done
and is doing. This world right now, we are in, my goodness, we are in
interesting times. The division that we are seeing, the existential dread and
the fear, the people in our own culture and in others who on a systemic level
are being told they are less than that they do not matter.
The Jesus movement started with a much smaller number of
people than this. The movement that terrified an empire and threatened to
change the world for love was a much smaller movement than this right here.

Homecoming - The Rev. Gary Lubin

If I were to pick a bird to symbolize Jesus' life, it would
be this albatross.
When Jesus was baptized, God declares, this is my beloved
son in whom I am well pleased. God expresses an
enduring love as a parent does for their child. Just like Mary and Joseph
cherished Jesus for just being who Jesus was. Then Jesus wanders the desert for 40
days, fasting, and he is tempted big time. I mean, this was the mother of all Lenten experiences.
Through it all, Jesus comes to fully appreciate his belovedness and not as a
possession or something to own, but as a gift
to be shared with others. Then Jesus wanders the sandy
oceans of the holy land for three years. Jesus heals and teaches and preaches
the Good News of shared love, sharing his belovedness. And at one time a
teacher of the law was so inspired by Jesus that he said to him, teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.
Well, Jesus warned him what it would be like saying, foxes
have dens and birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his
head. Jesus had no place to call home, no real place to call home. He may have
been born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth, but he wandered far and wide
like that albatross.
And the one time he did return to Nazareth, they
tried to throw him off a cliff and he just flew away. And indeed, Jerusalem was
his real destination all along. He may not have even known it. The temple
is there after all, Jesus was drawn there like an albatross to its nest.

The Power and Wisdom of God - The Rev. Melanie W. J. Slane

Having a spiritual experience can happen in a split second.
And trust me, you'll know when you see it, when you feel it. It is essential in
understanding this dilemma that we remember who Paul is speaking to. The church
in Rome, a complicated convergence of two vastly different cultural communities
bound together by a common spiritual experience.
To oversimplify and generalize the two, we can do it like
drawing the line down the center of the page. On one side, we have the Jews on
the other side, the Greeks. I remember being a little girl and my dad telling
me, you know, Melanie, there are only two types of people in this world, those
who are Greek, and those who wish they were Greek. In Rome these two
communities were separated by contrasting worldviews. The Hebrew view of the
world was grounded in earthly material realities in which they lived, spiritual
truth found only in justice.
And on the other side, the Greek view to simplify was
asserted that the highest human experience is knowledge. Always seeking to
explain why people fall in love like Aeros and Aphrodite. Why night turns to day
like Hyperion and why it rained on my wedding day when there wasn't a cloud in
the sky. Oh, just we don't talk about Bruno, no.
This is why in Paul's letter to the Corinthians, Paul
reduces these two communities to their simplest form in saying Jews demand
signs and Greeks desire wisdom. It would be like summarizing the political
divisions of our day to say, Republicans demand guns and Democrats they desire
taxes, but we all know it really isn't that simple, is it?