You can read or listen to the sermons below, or you can download the .pdf format to your computer.
Today we celebrate the feast day of Mary Magdalene, one of only a handful of saints we honor on a Sunday morning at St. John’s. Mary Magdalene has a unique role in our tradition in that all four gospels say she was the first person that the risen Jesus appeared to, before even the twelve male disciples. Three of the four gospels also name Mary Magdalene as present at the crucifixion, and two of them name her again as observantly watching where Jesus was buried.
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This is the Sunday that I sometimes think of as the one set aside to reflect on a group of hard-workers in our church community: all the people who do much of the grunt work of keeping our wheels greased and gears turning.
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I was at my family’s cabin over the July 4 weekend, and we were reminiscing about our family’s friends when I was a kid. One particular scenario came up I hadn’t known about. My best friend Lori had four older brothers who were in my parents’ Sunday School class. One day one of the boys came crying to my parents because his parents never ever had a birthday party for the boys, but only had a birthday party for the daughter, my friend Lori. I didn’t know that. My parents were in their late twenties at the time and weren’t sure what to do about that, so they didn’t follow up.
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The week before last Linda and I spent time in Baxter on a mini vacation… I had the opportunity to fish, and she had time to herself. I researched and hired an exceptional guide for two days and was very successful at both fishing and catching fish. More importantly, I had the opportunity to practice civil conversations with John, my guide.
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Today is a mix of so many things. To begin with it is the day we celebrate the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, our church’s namesake. It is Pride, when LGBTQ people from all over the world celebrate their identities which are natural, God-given, and beautiful. In fact our own Madison Gies put together a beautiful Pride Project that is on display at St. Mark’s Cathedral in downtown Minneapolis—you should go see it.
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Today we return to the Gospel of Luke after several weeks with John. Today’s gospel story, which is noted in all three of the synoptics, follows immediately after the story of Jesus calming the seas from the storm that had frightened the disciples so much, they woke Jesus from a deep sleep in fear, and after he had calmed the gale winds they continued to be in awe and wonder, questioning who this Jesus was who commands even the winds and the waters.
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Trinity Sunday is a complicated liturgical day. My spiritual director, a monastic, shared that he was assigned to preach on Trinity Sunday three years in a row…. he was not sure if it was a cruel joke, or some retribution. Preaching on the Trinity is akin to a Zen Koan, the sound of one hand clapping.
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Today is Pentecost. On this day the church remembers and celebrates the Holy Spirit falling on the disciples and empowering them to speak in other languages. This experience could only be compared to a powerful wind or many sparks from a great fire. In the biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek, the word Spirit also means breath and wind. The Spirit was what gave birth to creation at the beginning of time, when She hovered over the face of the deep in an intimate and tender caress like a mother hovering over her child.
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Almost exactly two years ago today, I began my time at St. John’s. We were a little over two months into the pandemic – a time when most of us were still locked down and scrambling to figure out what was safe, what was not, and even what sources of information we could trust to help us tell the difference. It was a week after George Floyd was murdered at 38th and Chicago. Minneapolis was still reeling from the event and its aftermath,
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There was a psychologist named Viktor Frankl who survived three years in Auschwitz and Dachau during World War II. After the war he wrote one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, called Man’s Search for Meaning. In this book he describes how the conditions of the concentration camps affected prisoners, and he said that he had seen over and over again that those prisoners who had found something to live for had a greater chance for survival, whereas those who had given up hope often succumbed to the brutal conditions of the camp and died.
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Sometimes we find ourselves in situations that invite a key response from us. Sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we really blow it. In my life, parenting provides many daily opportunities to show up or fail to show up. One night I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep, and I suddenly realized that that day, my kid had opened up to me about something vulnerable, and that I had responded by lecturing instead of listening.
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I remember years ago when I was practicing medicine in Flint, Michigan. Everywhere I went back then I saw billboards and bumper-stickers proclaiming “I Found It.” And I couldn’t help but think that this was the wrong way around. It should have been “It found me.” Because that is the way that first Easter story went – Jesus found his followers, when they did not even know to search. Jesus will find us… we cannot hide. God is present, whether bidden or not.
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I want to acknowledge those who are here in person. Each of you is priceless, a gift from God. I want to acknowledge each of you who are joining us over the internet. COVID did at least help us figure out how to livestream, more or less. Each of you is priceless, a gift from God. And I want to acknowledge our loved ones who were with us three years ago the last time we did this but who now exist within the vastness of God’s Holy Mystery, united with the presence and love of God, who are also each priceless, a gift from God.
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The women in today’s lesson were doing what they had been doing throughout Luke’s Gospel. They had been supporting and caring; when most of the disciples had deserted, the women had remained at the foot of the cross while Jesus died; now they had prepared spices to anoint the dead body, carrying out the ritual duties owed by family and friends to those who are gone.
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On this Good Friday, I find myself thinking about a ritual called the ¡Presente! litany. It is a traditional ritual, thought to be hundreds of years old, practiced in Central and Latin America, to honor those who have died, and especially those who have died as a result of violence, injustice, or oppression.
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This is available only as an audio file.
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It may seem strange to be here on Palm Sunday, and to have the story end where it just did. What normally happens on Palm Sunday is that after we wave our palm branches to remember Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, we come inside and hear every step of the rest of the story: Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, his betrayal and arrest, his crucifixion and death. But we stopped early, this year.
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I grew up in Minnesota until I was 12 years old. My family was Methodist, so when I was eleven I was introduced to church summer camp at good old Camp Koronis in Paynesville, MN. As I was writing this, I became curious and googled the camp. It is still there, just as it was over 65 years ago, when I attended for a week in each of two summers.
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In today’s gospel reading we have a very familiar story, often called the Prodigal Son. It is the story of a man who had two sons, one of whom goes off to squander the inheritance he prematurely demanded of his father. This son ends up nearly dying of hunger until he wakes up and returns home, hoping to be accepted as a servant so he can eat again. But instead, he is welcomed and honored by the overwhelming love of his father whose child had been dead and lost and who has against all odds been found and is alive.
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Melting Snow and Cleaning up after your dog in the backyard Leaves left forgotten, Lost toys, barbeque and lawn tools Wasteland, TS Eliot April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers.
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We’ve decided to look for joy this Lent. Nothing says we have to wallow in our sinfulness so we can get ready for Easter. Now it’s true that we’ve had the habit of giving up chocolate, gossip, or sarcasm for Lent. We’ve treated Lent as a self- improvement season.
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Today is the first Sunday in Lent in case you hadn’t noticed. I’m curious, what do you associate with Lent? Lent is traditionally the forty days before Easter in which people learned about faith, fasted, and prayed like Jesus did in today’s gospel reading. And the reason Lent lasts for forty days is because in the Hebrew imagination, the number forty represents transformation. Jesus spends forty days in the wilderness in today’s gospel text. The heavens opened and poured rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights in the time of the Flood, when Noah built the ark. The people of Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty full years after leaving slavery before they were ready to enter the promised land. In all these stories, there is something ending, and something else beginning. I think it’s no coincidence that it takes forty weeks for a baby to grow in a mother’s womb.
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Every year on Ash Wednesday, we recognize the fragility of life. That it has a beginning and an end. That we are dust and we will return to dust. But even without Ash Wednesday, our own mortality couldn’t be more obvious right now. I don’t need to go into detail about the various ways we’ve been reminded of it over the last few years and the last week.
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I used to volunteer at a nonprofit called Break the Cycle, whose mission was to help teenagers protect and free themselves from dating and domestic violence by understanding abuse and their legal rights. We taught about the predictable cycles of abuse which will continue unless you understand and have the power to interrupt them. And in general, we all know that violence and hatred perpetuate themselves. Someone is harmed, they retaliate, more loss and more retaliation occur, and on and on it goes. During the cold war, the entire arms race counted on the logic of mutually assured destruction.
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Welcome Back! Thankful we can be together again…. “Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in.” That of course is from Anthem by Leonard Cohen, he wrote of this poem: there is a crack in everything that you can put together: Physical objects, mental objects, constructions of any kind. But that’s where the light gets in, and that’s where the resurrection is and that’s where the return, that’s where the repentance is. It is with the confrontation, with the brokenness of things.
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If you have ever spent any time around lakes or oceans, you will know that the surface of most bodies of water looks the same. Whether you’re on the local lake or the Pacific Ocean or Lake Superior, whether it’s 10 feet deep or 10 miles deep, when you’re sitting in a boat on top of it, the surface looks the same.
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During this season of Christmas and Epiphany, and now today when we celebrate Presentation Day — the day that Jesus’s parents bring their baby to the temple to be part of Jewish rituals of presentation and purification — I’ve been thinking a lot about Mary and Joseph. Perhaps I’ve been thinking about these two because of my own relatively new parenthood. Or perhaps because I’m pregnant again and we’re expecting our own new baby to be born this summer.
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Today after this service we are having our Annual Meeting over zoom, which is a time both to look backwards at the previous year, and also to look forward at the year to come. I truly hope that every one of you will come to the meeting. In it we will be doing some visioning exercises. We will imagine what a vital faith community would be like that truly nourishes and excites us, in which we see clear evidence of God at work because we are aligned with our highest values and our true purpose, following Jesus’ Way of Love. But to have a true vision of the future, we need to know what it is about who we are and have been that is most important. We are called to dig deep to the bedrock of our scriptures and tradition to find where it all began, when it was fresh and powerful and alive, in a way that speaks to us today.
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In the name of God, who speaks to us even now. This morning, we honor the memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, whose birthday is a national holiday. He was a brilliant writer and orator, and a formidable organizer. He could simultaneously radiate hope and urgency.
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Perhaps some of you remember a beautiful little book, published about 25 years ago, called The Four Agreements. This book conveys four primary teachings of the ancient Toltec peoples of Mexico, of which the first and most important is to “be impeccable with your word.”
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I am an enthusiastic listener to MPR classical public radio. Through most of Advent they played Christmas music. We hadn’t started singing carols here in church, since that is not our time for it. Now, however, we are in the season of Christmastide, robustly singing its noels here. But MPR has abandoned me. They, like the rest of the world, think that the season is over, and have turned their attention to the coming New Year’s Eve, and a stream of Strauss Waltzes.
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Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word: Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives.
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Merry Christmas! I’m so glad to see your shining faces—well, at least your eyes. Each of us has come here from different places and for different reasons. Whether you live alone or are celebrating with family and friends; whether you love Christmas or are too busy to notice; and especially for those of us who are grieving the absence of loved ones to celebrate with, regardless, here WE are, together, in person and online. Let’s all say Merry Christmas to the people who are joining us remotely.
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Every Sunday, we hear evidence that God speaks to people. Or that God did so, once upon a time. The Bible readings always say so, even if God’s off-stage, in an advisory role. And Christmas is my favorite example of God speaking with very few words. Gabriel invites Mary to give birth to a divine child. She says yes and composes a song. Luke made sure to include the lyrics in his Gospel. You could call it the Gospel According to Mary. We just heard Elizabeth’s dust-jacket blurb, “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what the Lord spoken to her.”
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I’m curious, did you like the translation of Luke’s gospel that Rex just read? It’s called The Message which is a paraphrase, not a direct word for word translation. Let’s start with a little exercise. Do me a favor and read the Gospel reading in the bulletin which is the more traditional translation.
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We are all here for many reasons. In the world outside our doors, many people are getting ready for Christmas and Hanukkah and the other holidays – getting trees, buying presents, making guest lists and planning big meals. In our tradition, these four weeks leading up to Christmas are not just a time of joyful preparation. This is Advent which is a time of longing and hopeful expectation, a season in which as the scriptures say “the people who sat in darkness and the shadow of death have seen a great light.” And I know that for many of us, this time is especially poignant. Some of us have lost our beloveds recently. Some lost loved ones long ago, but that ache never really goes away.
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John is a troublemaker. He is loud, confident, and based on history had huge followings, people who were daily repressed by the economic systems of Jerusalem, Herod, and the Empire. His criticisms of government and the economy are devastating…he warns that God’s Axe is laid at the root of the tree, Jerusalem, that we can all be replaced; God can raise up children from these stones.
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“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world.” And with those words, happy Advent, everyone! Now, I must admit that I was feeling slightly grumpy about having to deal with this reading from Luke today – this apocalyptic message, these words about fear, foreboding, and distress. I felt like I had pulled the short straw.
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In today’s gospel reading we have one of the most famous dramas in history. Pontius Pilate, the Roman Prefect of Judea, has Jesus on trial for supposedly claiming to be a king, which would not be tolerated by the Roman Empire. But when Pontius Pilate asks him if he is a king, Jesus won’t answer the question. The closest he gets to an answer is to say that his kingdom is not from his world otherwise his followers would be fighting to protect him.
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Linda and I were married on January 5, 1970, at Saint Michael’s Episcopal Church in Riverside California. A Monday Evening at 7pm, in the midst of a significant Santa Ana wind storm, powerful wind storms in Southern California that blow from east to west off of the dry desert, it is said that the winds can make you crazy. You might ask how we scheduled a Monday Night wedding, so close after the holidays. I was on winter break from graduate school in Northern California. I had to be back to teach a graduate course in Bob Dylan, prophet, and poet. And, we were sort of sneaking home to get married.
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Grace, peace, and mercy from God Our lord and Savior Jesus Christ, amen. Good morning. It is a pleasure and honor to be with this morning to preach on this All-saints Sunday. I have had the pleasure of knowing a number of people who have been members at St Johns over the years. In my earliest days in Minnesota, I met St John members like, Mariann Budde, Michelle Dibblee and others who provided leadership in Isaiah faith-based community organizing.
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Some of you know may know that our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry occasionally preaches from a text that is not in the lectionary readings at all. I figure if he can do it, I can do it. So I’d like to read to you from the gospel of John, a section that our Minnesota Bishop Craig Loya has asked the entire Episcopal Church in Minnesota to reflect on throughout this fall. Here is part of that reading:
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The Gospel of Mark is both the earliest and shortest of the four Gospels that have come down to the church. Because of its structure, it is sometimes referred to by scholars as a Passion Narrative with a brief introduction. After all, today we are at the end of the 10th chapter out of a 16 chapter book. The healing of the blind man, Bartimaeus, is the climax of the first half of the story, and is the last miracle in this Gospel.
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About a dozen years ago, I was at a conference in Washington, D.C., and I had a free afternoon. I stepped out of my hotel with my destination in sight — the National Cathedral.
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The gospel story for today is well known in church. It’s the story of the man who comes with great deference to ask Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus answers him by reminding him of what we now call the Ten Commandments: Don’t steal. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t covet. If you are willing to zoom way in to this story and enter it imaginatively with your mind’s eye, you can see this man. He is a good man. He says, “I have kept all these commandments since I was young.” Now we know no one is perfect.
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Two weeks ago I was very blessed to be able to attend what was called a “Planetary Healing Retreat” at Liberty Community Church. Liberty is a predominantly African American church in North Minneapolis whose primary ministries revolve around healing from various kinds of trauma, including racism and sex trafficking. Recently, one of their co-pastors, Alika Galloway, felt the Spirit leading her to begin to expand their vision to include planetary healing.
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At the recent House of Bishops Meeting Presiding Bishop Curry spoke of the Time of Covid, of the complicated emotions of loss and lament, anger and fear, pain and frustration. “We are living in a narthex moment, he said between the world we knew and whatever is being born,”
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One of the most interesting things I learned at seminary in Hebrew class was the meaning of the word דֶ֣רל which translates ‘way, manner, road.’ But this is not ‘road’ in the sense of saying, “take 35W north.” It refers at a deeper level to following in the ways or path set forth by God. So then, after the death of Solomon, Israel split into a northern kingdom of Israel and a southern kingdom of Judah.
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How many of you know what an “intervention” is? We are going to do something completely untraditional—I actually would love it if someone would answer the question. Out loud. Introverts, don’t worry, no one has to say anything if you don’t want to. So OK, what’s an intervention? What’s the goal of an intervention?
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Several years ago, I was driving on the east coast. I had been in Washington, D.C., and was headed to North Carolina to visit my parents. I was on Interstate 95 in Virginia, a road surrounded on both sides by lush green trees and little farms. Along the way, I passed a caravan of five or six cars that grabbed my attention.
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Quiet and reflective? Traditional or contemporary? Geared toward adults, or children? The answer is yes, we hope, to all of the above.
Download our Parish Profile here.
St. John's Episcopal Church
4201 Sheridan Ave S
Minneapolis, MN 55410
Phone: 612-922-0396
Email: info@stjohns-mpls.org
10:00am: Service of Holy Eucharist.
Check our calendar here for a daily schedule of events.
The current ministry schedule is available to all lay ministers by clicking on the Ministry Scheduler Pro link below:
- August 14, 2022
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Contemplative Prayer
August 14, 2022 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Via ZoomContact Dianne Pizey for the zoom link.
- August 18, 2022
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