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Showing posts from May, 2010

Sermon for Sixth Sunday of Easter, "And She Prevailed"

Sermon 5/9/10, Acts 16:9-15 And She Prevailed Do you know the history of Mother’s Day? Celebrations of Mothers are centuries and cultures old. Some people suggest that such celebrations of motherhood started perhaps even in Ancient Greece. In the United States, a push for an official Mother’s Day started in the late 1800s. Julia Ward Howe, author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic , was an abolitionist and social activist who pushed for a mother’s day celebration as a call to action. She wanted women to use their influence to call for change, and was particularly upset over the carnage of the Civil War. In 1870 she wrote this Mother’s Day Proclamation: (1)   Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether our baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn Al

Sermon for Fifth Sunday of Easter, "At the Table"

Sermon 5/2/10, Acts 11:1-18 At the Table During Lent, I asked participants in our midweek communion study to help me brainstorm about food imagery in the bible. There’s lots of it – if you go from beginning to end, the books of the Bible mention food perhaps a surprising number of times. But then again, maybe it shouldn’t surprise us. Eating and drinking are necessary to our survival. If we don’t eat, we don’t live. It’s that simple. And so not only is food and drink mentioned frequently in the Bible because we eat and drink every day, it also shows up in our faith stories because what better way for us to understand how God wants to be in our lives than to connect it to food? We need God like we need food – we need God to live – to have real, abundant life. God is necessary for abundant life. Communion is served with simple foods – bread and juice – basics – because communing with God and with each other in the Body of Christ is a basic. Foundational. My first congregation had the c