Sermons from the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer

Fiery Peace - The Rev. Dr. Herschel Wade

It is not the peace of silence and not the peace of compromise. Instead, it is a fiery peace, a peace that upends false order, a peace that demands you align your life fully with Jesus. And that will bring division. That will bring division because the world prefers its false peace to God's true one. It is here now that we must slow down and listen because this is where Jesus confronts us directly.
 
We love peace. We long for it. And there's nothing wrong with longing for peace so long as we are longing for the right kind of peace. And friends, there are two types of peace, and Jesus came to draw a line between them. There is false peace. The peace that Dr. King Dec condemned as negative. Peace, the absence of tension.
 
It is the peace demanded by oppressors who say, don't stir up trouble. It is the peace demanded by politicians who condemn protests, but not the death dealing and justices that provoke them. It is the peace that we sometimes practice when we say, let's just keep the peace, rather than face hard truths.

Practice - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

 You know the old joke, how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. Practice. How do you get to Carnegie Hall practice? It's a good joke. It's a good joke, right? It's based on the idea of one person coming, asking for practical directions, and the other person is giving them some aspirational idea, and that's sort of the foundation of the misunderstanding.
It's that same misunderstanding between one person trying to be practical and another person trying to be aspirational. It's that same misunderstanding that so often is at the heart of our disconnect from God and our work that Jesus gives us to do. We. Keep trying to make our lives about some aspiration towards heaven, about being a specific, perfect kind of people.
And we turn the Christian life into some ineffable mystery, some intangible thing that we will never be able to do because we seek some sort of perfection, some elusive thing. 'Cause I could practice all day and never get to Carnegie Hall. I just want directions right? But the reality is this is exactly what Jesus is trying to work on.
 

We Have Choices - The Rev. Joyce Keeshin

We all have our stories, our life experiences that help shape our relationship with wealth, with security, with possessions, and the value we place on them. And it's always easy to point to others' influence, but ultimately, we make our own choices. We make choices every day, every moment. What we value, what calls us, who we are, whose we are, who we love, how we communicate, love, and give love.
 
We all know that wanting more isn't just about wealth or power. We might want more time with a loved one, particularly one who's struggling. We may want more time for ourselves. Particularly in this time when we feel pulled in so many different directions, we may want what the rich man spoke of to be able to relax, eat, drink, and be merry.
 
There's certainly nothing wrong with those things

Inextricably Connected - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Our understanding of God and so much of our language of God is tied up in God's transcendence, God's magnificence, God's all being, all powerful, all knowing. This sort of unfathomable, ineffable and indescribable being, unreachable in so many ways, invisible. To speak of God as to speak beyond our own capacity for understanding.
 
Jesus insists on this language, this parental language, this familial language, because throughout Jesus' life and ministry, Jesus is trying to teach people that we are deeply and utterly and inextricably connected to God. That we are totally and utterly belonging to God. That we have the same last name as God and we share the same house, the same blood as God.
 
This is the level of intimacy with God that Jesus would like us to understand.

When Jesus Whispers - The Rev. Brooklin Taylor

In a text where we don't often hear a tone of voice when we read it, it can be hard to understand or interpret text all the same way, and I would suggest we don't often find Jesus in the Gospels whispering. He preaches from boats. He lifts his voice on mountains. He rebukes wind and demons. He calls the dead to rise, but today he does none of that.
 
Today, I would argue in our Gospel story, he whispers. Today we get to feel the softness of his voice. And his gentle touch on our elbow today, we find him tucked in a kitchen, in a quiet corner of Martha's house, speaking so softly. We might have missed the point altogether. Perhaps you have heard this story before, and perhaps like me, you felt the pressure that often comes with it.
 

Righteous Qualifiers - The Rev. Dr. Herschel Wade

They worshiped the same God in theory, but had different scriptures, different holy sites, but a history of mutual hatred. Each side viewed the other as defiled, heretical, and other. For a devout you, a Samaritan was the opposite of neighbor. More like a despised outsider. Yet here in Jesus' story, it's a Samaritan who approaches our wounded friend.
 
He comes near and his heart is filled with compassion. He immediately sets about saving a stranger's life. He cleans them up as best he can. And lifts him up and brings him to safety, sparing no expense. Whatever you need, I will cover it when I return. In other words, whatever it takes, I'm invested in this man's survival.
 
This is extravagant mercy. It is costly, it's risky, it's messy. And Jesus deliberately makes a hero of a story. A person who, by all accounts, should have been a victory victim, an enemy of the victim. If the wounded man was a Jew, which is implied, then it is his enemy that Samaritan who saved him, whereas his fellow Judeans left him for dead.
 
You can almost hear the gasp of the crowd. It's hard to overstate how offensive this would've sounded to some of Jesus' listeners. It's as if Jesus told them a story about a devout Christian pastor who walks by someone in dire need, and then a Muslim immigrant or an atheist comes along and is the one who shows the love of Christ.

Off the Bench - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

The reality that Jesus tells his apostles is you're going to go out, you're going to do this work, you're going to spread this love. You're going to tell the message. And if they get it, great, and if they don't find a way, when you leave the town to acknowledge that the kingdom of God has drawn near. And this is such an important thing that we skip right over. I think that the kingdom of God has drawn near. Jesus does not say the kingdom of God will draw near soon, or, Hey, the kingdom of God was gonna show up at this town, but you guys really screwed it up.
 
Jesus says, The Kingdom of God has drawn near. When you all go to that place, the Kingdom of God is there, my friends. You embody the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is not just about the place you go when you die, because my friends, we pray thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

A Turning Point - The Rev. Brooklin Taylor

 There comes a moment in every life when something shifts. Sometimes it's a whisper in the night. Sometimes it's a headline that stops your breath. Sometimes it's quieter than that. Just a flicker at the edge of your spirit. A longing, a holy ache. You cannot shake a recognition that the way things currently are is not the way that they are meant to be.
And if you are paying attention, you know that this is a summons to you. A call to leave what's known and step into something that feels wild. That feels holy and feels deeply uncertain, and in today's gospel, Jesus answers that call when the days drew near our texts, say for him to be taken up. Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem.
Now, that's the kind of line that honestly just slips past you if you're not looking for it. But if you stop for a moment, I invite you to let the weight of it settle in. This is the moment when the light shifts. This is the moment when the shadows start to lengthen towards Jerusalem. Jesus has just come down from the Mount of Transfiguration in the Gospel of Luke, where his face was still shimmering with glory where Moses and Elijah appeared, and where Luke, the author is tying him unmistakably to the lineage of prophets who bring freedom and the prophets who bring liberation.
 

The Horror - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

So, I don't like horror movies. Okay? I don't. They scare me and I'm not good at being scared. I don't like things that scare me. I'm one of those people. I don't see horror movies very often. I don't like things that are gross. I kind of try to stay away from those things. But in  2003, my brother and I decided to go to the movies and see a terrifying horror movie.
 
Now, I'm gonna tell you the name of this movie, but I want you to remember a few things. It was a long time ago, and I wasn't always a priest. I also want to note before I tell you about this movie, I am not recommending this movie to you. So don't leave church and be like, my priest said I should watch this movie.
 
No, I didn't.  Okay. But in 2003, my brother and I walked into the movie theater and saw a movie called House of a Thousand Corpses. It was horrifying. It was disgusting. It was terrible. I was overwhelmed. I was grabbing onto my brother's hands. I was closing my eyes. I was shrieking and screaming.
 
At one point, I was so overwhelmed I even had to laugh, not 'cause it was funny, but I didn't know what else to do with my body. I looked over at my brother at one point and said, I have to go to the bathroom. And he said, why are you telling me? And I said, because I don't want to go alone. I was a grown, I was in my twenties, y'all.
 
I was not 10 years old. And he goes, neither do I. And we got up together and went to the bathroom, and then we went back.

Blueprint Trinity - The Rev. Dr. Herschel Wade

Friends, the Trinity is not a riddle or a secret to be solved or unveiled, but the Trinity is a mystery, and it's an invitation to be accepted and entered into. It is a relationship of mutual glorification where each person of the Trinity points not to self, but to each other, one another. You see, the relational pattern of the divine Trinity is not solely reserved for God and the heavens.
 
No. It is given as a blueprint for the church and human life. A vision for how we live with one another, particularly across differences. On this Trinity Sunday, it seems fitting that we are called to ponder the mysteries of the Trinity and how it speaks to the struggles and hopes of our divided world.
 
You see, the Trinitarian truth of which Jesus speaks is not a truth merely of doctrinal correctness. This truth is not about having the correct beliefs in our heads. No, this Spirit's truth is deeply moral, deeply relational and deeply historical. It is the truth that rips off the band-aid and uncovers hidden wounds.
 
It is the truth that names Injustice, and it is the truth that, if heard, brings liberation. We have seen this spirit at work through movement for racial reconciliation and justice. We have seen truths long buried come to life. We have learned and have lived with the truth of stolen lands, broken treaties, red line neighborhoods, segregated schools, and generational trauma.