Category Archives: Sermons
July 1, 2012 “The God Who is There”
Wednesday evening this past week, when we had wrapped up our Bible study and were chatting and all getting ready to head home, Karen couldn’t find her keys. We all began to search everywhere we could think of, and she dumped out her purse; we retraced her steps, trying to remember every possible place the …
June 24, 2012 “Do You Trust Me?”
Probably most of you have seen the Disney movie “Aladdin”. I haven’t watched it in a long time, so forgive me if I don’t get the details quite right, but there is a scene in which Aladdin and Princess Jasmine are running from some very bad bad guys. The princess has run away from the …
June 17, 2012 “Growing the Kingdom”
It’s June, and because we are blessed to live in a rural community, almost everywhere you go around here you see fields and gardens growing up. The corn has to get busy if it’s going to be knee-high by the fourth of July in the North Country – I hear this year it’s well on …
Apr. 22 Easter 3 John’s Second Big Idea: Light
There is an alternative version of the story I have already told you of the apostle John that Fr. Peay mentioned to me at the clergy retreat I attended this past week. In this version, each week John’s disciples would carry the very, very old apostle into the church gathering and he would always say …
May 20, 2012 Easter 7 John’s Sixth Big Idea: Eternal Life
Lately the world has been, it seems to me, particularly beautiful. All the trees have leafed out now into their fresh new shades of brilliant, almost fluorescent green, and flowering trees are covered with clouds of fragrant blossoms, like our lovely crabapple Ruth planted beside St. Philip’s years ago. The grass grows as fast as …
May 13, 2012 Easter 6 John’s Fifth Big Idea: the World
Probably the most famous – and, in my opinion, the best – fantasy book ever written is The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. It is actually made up of three books, and it is an epic story about a place called Middle Earth. Unlike most fantasy writers, Tolkien is a masterful writer, and …
May 6, 2012 Easter 5 John’s Fourth Big Idea: Love
One of the special things we do in the season of Easter is instead of having a reading from the Old Testament for the first reading of the Mass, traditionally we have a reading from the book of the Acts of the Apostles. And so today we began the readings with the story of our …
Apr. 15, 2012 Easter 2 John’s First Big Idea: Incarnation
The season of Easter doesn’t end when we have finished our Easter dinner leftovers and put our wilting pots of Easter lilies on the back porch. Easter, the celebration of our new life in Christ, continues on for 50 days and ends with the wonderful feast of Pentecost, when we celebrate the pouring out of …
Apr. 8, 2012 Easter “The Testimony of Witnesses”
Never believe anything just because you read it on the internet, or hear about it on television, or most especially because you see it pictured on the front of those newspapers in the checkout line at the grocery store. We live in the information age – there are facts in abundance; both true and completely …
Apr. 7, 2012 Easter Vigil “Walk in Newness of Life”
I think that almost everyone in this room has had the experience of finding out about the birth of a new baby – remember that moment when you learned that you, or your wife, or your sister or mother or friend, was carrying a new life. There was a person in the world now who …
St. Philip's Episcopal Church 