Who the hell is Mary Magdalene? James was the brother of Jesus, the head of the church in Jerusalem, but he is nowhere to be found on Easter morning. Paul was the founder of all the Gentile churches across the Mediterranean, but Easter morning found him still busy persecuting anyone who wasn’t Jewish enough. And Peter was the head of …
When We Rise Up
It’s unclear whether the Gospel of Mark should be read with a mullet or a beret. It was ignored for the first six centuries of Christian history because it is clumsily written and has an odd narrative structure. But now we have post-modernism and what was considered clumsy is now considered a point of view; what was odd is now …
Finding Life in a Place of Death
This was the sermon from Easter Sunday: When the women go to the tomb on that Sunday morning, they are expecting to find a corpse. Because Jesus died after noon on a Friday, it was not possible to properly prepare his body for burial. The women who had followed him all the way from Galilee returned on Sunday morning to …
Looking For a Miracle
Tomorrow is Easter, the day that Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, the day that, for many, defines what the faith is entirely about. I have to admit, I always have a little trouble making the shift from Lent to Eastertide, the season between Easter and Pentecost. Maybe I’m just a Lent kind of guy with a dark turn of …
From Death into Life
This is the season when we sit with death and find the way to new life. Doug Pagitt says that every preacher has four sermons that get preached over and over and over. I guess this is one of my four. I’ll take it. Last night was our Maundy Thursday service. It was a very Church in the Cliff night. …
New Life
One of the quirks of doing ministry within the liturgical calendar is that we often have to think about things out of order, so that they might be presented in order. That is, in the middle of Advent, I really should be planning Lent, in a time of hopeful expectation, planning the mournful journey to the tomb. The liturgical calendar …
Easter Sunday (Sermon and Program)
Program Sermon: “Go Back to Galilee” A reading from the Gospel According to Mark, chapter 16, verses 1 through 8: When the Sabbath was over, Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought perfumed oils so that they could anoint Jesus. Very early, just after sunrise on the first day of the week, they came to the …