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A sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 10
July 16, 2023 The Rev. Mark Nabors, Vicar Readings: Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 “Listen! A sower went out to sow.” Of all of Jesus’s parables, this may have the most memorable start. We know what comes next–the sower throws seed indiscriminately on all kinds of ground. Sometimes the seed sprouts; sometimes it doesn’t. When it does sprout, sometimes it thrives; sometimes it doesn’t.
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A sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 9
July 9, 2023 The Rev. Mark Nabors, Vicar Readings: Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30 You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting– over and over announcing your place in the family of things. That poem is by Mary Oliver, the renowned contemporary poet who writes so eloquently about the natural world and the spiritual life. She shows how the two are intimately connected, and how we, beloved creatures and children of God, are bound up in the middle of it all. But perhaps when I started the poem, you raised your eyebrows. Her opening line, you don’t have to be good–well it flies in the face of a lot of what we think about, of the story we tell ourselves, of what we think of when we think about leading a Christian life. A sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 8
July 2, 2023 The Rev. Mark Nabors, Vicar Readings: Genesis 22:1-14 I have a vivid memory from my childhood. I was probably around 8 years old. It’s dark, and we are on our way to the hospital for me to have yet another surgery. That was the year I had one surgery every two to three months. The recovery was painful, and just as I felt I was about healed I had to go back. In the darkness, in the backseat, I remember feeling as if no one around me really understood what I felt. I did not feel like anyone could really see me–that is, I didn’t feel like anyone could understand what I was dealing with. I felt alone, and my questions to God went unanswered. As I’ve grown, I have wondered what my mother, alone in the front seat, was thinking about on that dark drive. Knowing what her son would go through in a couple of short hours must have been painful for her, too. How helpless she must have felt. |
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