A sermon preached July 14, 2013, at Union Congregational Church UCC in North Reading, MA.
Tag: Ministry
When to Walk Away
I hit all the points I wanted to hit, and yet I felt that I did not do justice to the urgency of the message I was preaching–that we so often look at the past and wish we could have been there to commit some violent act to prevent an injustice, that we forget that we have the opportunity to insist on peaceful solutions every day. We find it so easy to tell a story and have no sympathy for the characters we recognize to be “bad,” that we get used to thinking about life in that way, rather than as the complicated, messy milieu we encounter every day.
Hope for the future
Working on my sermon for tomorrow’s services at Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church, I wonder how folks who consistently preach without notes deal with the waiting period between sermon prep and sermon delivery. When I was writing manuscripts, I would stop when I hit the right note and then do another two rounds of… Continue reading Hope for the future
On the end of a ministry
This time last year, I was anxiously awaiting the final say on whether I’d be hired as a campus minister (I wasn’t really sure until late July, and even then there was some ambiguity as to the length of my service). Anxious partly because this seemed like the only ministry work that I seemed likely… Continue reading On the end of a ministry
Tribal identities
I have been continuing to reflect on the sermon I delivered for Thomas Sunday. That message, that the disciples of Jesus could not draw their status from their proximity to Jesus, has been resonating with me in the political season. It’s hard not to draw our identity from our proximity to people we perceive as… Continue reading Tribal identities