Today is the second Sunday of Lent. I’ve been preaching on sacred polity (that which is called the “Kingdom of God”) — the “deep structure” at the heart of creation — and how that polity is in tension with imperial Christianity, and weaving the stories with both ancient history and today’s news.
Below are my sermons for the first two Sundays of this season.
Lent 1: Bread, Power, and Safety: The Single Temptation
Text: Luke 4:1-13, preached at Rockville United Church, Rockville, MD
Lent 2: The Hidden God: Seeing the Deep Structure of Creation
Text: Isaiah 45:11-19 (assigned by the congregation), preached at Annandale UMC, Annandale, VA
The notion of a “sacred polity” is drawn from my book, Grounded.
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All of the devotions are available on the Cottage archive. You can catch up and revisit previous reflections to read at your convenience.
A prayer for you all this evening, may we come home to peace:
To the home of peace,
to the field of love,
to the land where forgiveness and right relationship meet,
we look, O God,
with longing for earth's children,
with compassion for the creatures,
with hearts breaking for the nations and people we love.
Open us to visions we have never known,
strengthen us for self-givings we have never made,
delight us with a oneness we could never have imagined,
that we may truly be born of You,
makers of peace.
— John Phillip Newell
Thanks for the sermon. It took me back make to any evening in the late 1980’s. I was the weekend on call call Chaplain at Sunnybrook Hospital. It was 2am, someone had died in a tragic accident and I was sitting with his wife, a woman in her 50’s. At some point I told her about William Sloan Coffins comments after his son died, something like “…. of all the persons who wept when my son died God was the first”. She looked me in the eye stood up and as she was leaving snarled “whoever the fuck needs a God who weeps”. God as a weak force is a difficult gospel to preach and to hear. Thank you
Thank you for both of these messages which fed my soul!!!