Category Archives: audio sermons
July 25, 2021, A Thing of Unreasonable Abundance, Mark 6:30-44 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell
The gospel today should have a very familiar ring for us, not only because it’s one of the best-known stories about Jesus, but because feeding people is something we do here at St. Philip’s. In fact, feeding people seems to be in our DNA. I remember reading the early records of our church, and way …
July 18, 2021, Comfort and Affliction, Mark 6:30-34 and 53-56 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell
To listen to this sermon, click here: At least four different people, Finley Peter Dunne, John Kenneth Galbraith, Lucille Clifton and Reinhold Niebuhr are credited with the phrase “to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted,” referring to everything from the media to poetry to God himself. And certainly it is the nature of anything …
July 11, 2021, Who Put the Fun in Dysfunctional?, Mark 6:14-29 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell
A good friend of mine has a magnet on her refrigerator that says, “My family puts the FUN in dysfunctional.” Family dysfunction is a little more out-in-the-open than it used to be, but it has always been one of the central places of suffering in our society. I grew up with a father who was …
July 4, 2021, Finding God in the Ordinary, Mark 6:1-6 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell
We might think that if God himself walked into St. Philip’s, if Jesus opened those front doors some Sunday morning and came in and sat down in one of our pews, surely we’d know him right away. We would fall to our knees in worship and adoration and joy as soon as we saw him. …
June 27, 2021, A Many Splendored Thing, Mark 5:21-43 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell
Before we moved to Norwood, we lived in Potsdam, on Cherry Street. We still had kids at home back then, and Victoria, our puppy-loving daughter, made friends with one of our neighbors who had just adopted a puppy from the shelter – a collie/husky mix just a few months old. Every day Victoria, who was …
June 20, 2021, The Wind and the Waves and the Fear of God, Mark 4:35-41 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell
The Sea of Galilee is notorious for having sudden and terrible storms just like the one Mark describes. Peter and the other apostles were in a little fishing boat in a worse storm than most of us have ever seen. The waves kept rising higher and higher, washing over the sides of the boat. The …
June 13, 2021, Now Seeds – Start Growing! Mark 4:26-34 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell
Jesus once said that the kingdom of God is in our midst – that it’s right here among us, right here inside us – but if we’re honest, most of us have a very hard time believing that. We struggle to believe the kingdom is right here, because we can’t see it. What Jesus means …
May 30, 2021, God’s Image Is Family, Trinity Sunday – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell
To listen to this sermon, click here: Today is Trinity Sunday, the Holy Feast Day following the Feast of Pentecost, where every year clergy tie themselves in knots seeking new ways to help people understand the doctrine of the Trinity, and every year people sit patiently in their pews knowing, when all is said and …
May 23, 2021, Do You Hear What I’m Saying? Acts 2:1-21 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell
It was about seventeen years ago that Carroll and I began attending Trinity Church in Potsdam. One of the earliest things I remember at Trinity is the Day of Pentecost. Being in Potsdam where there are two universities, Trinity has a pretty diverse congregation, so it is their tradition on Pentecost that when the Deacon …
May 16, 2021, You Can Choose Your Friends, John 17 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell
If you use Corelle dishes at your house, you know that they look and feel like glass, only they’re unbreakable – until they’re not. If you’ve ever dropped a Corelle plate onto a hard floor, you know that when they do break, they don’t just break. They shatter into a million billion smithereens. It seems …
