Jun 11, 2023 |
Speak From Your Guttural
| The Rev. Adrienne KochSpeak From Your Guttural
Genesis 1:1-2:4a, Psalm 33:1-12
A sermon preached by the Rev. Adrienne Koch at Trinity Cathedral on the second Sunday After Pentecost 2023.
A sermon preached by the Rev. Adrienne Koch at Trinity Cathedral on the second Sunday After Pentecost 2023.
According to Talmud, the psalmist is not telling us that God created the heavens with a word, but rather, that God created the heavens with the part of speech that comes before a word, “the breath of the mouth.” You see, the word, heaven in Hebrew begins with the guttural letter “Heh,” in the word hashamayim. Heaven was created with God’s “heh”.
The imperceptible sound that created the heavens and soul is the Spirit that Genesis tells us hovered over the waters of chaos before God said, “let there be!” and created the world. This Spirit, this breath of God would then make its way into the dirt lungs of Adam and Eve and eventually, you and me.
What if you thought of pausing your speech as an echo of the moment heaven was created. What might fill the void if we leave it blank for a while? The psalmist tells us that it’s the loving-kindness of God that fills the whole earth, an earth born from a long pause, a white space, the “heh” of God’s breath that still longs to speak heavens into existence within our souls today.
Jun 04, 2023 |
God, Gods and Humans
| The Very Rev. Bernard J. OwensGod, Gods and Humans
A sermon by the Very Rev. Bernard J Owens on June 4, 2023, Trinity Sunday.
God said, “let us make humankind, and let’s do so in our image.” Which means that this mystery is in us, and that there is a piece within each of us that is as unknowable to us as the divine mystery itself.
When God says “let us” create humankind, we get a clearer picture of who God is not. God is not a solitary monarch. God is not a CEO. God is not “the man upstairs.” God is not a petulant deity whose vanity must be soothed. God is not addicted to sacrifice. God did not create this world for purposes of extraction or consumption.
God is infinitely creative, blessedly free of ego and insecurity, profoundly loving, averse to violence, and deeply relational. And because we are created in God’s image and likeness, that is the essence of who we are, too.
May 28, 2023 |
The Household of God
| The Rev. Adrienne KochThe Household of God
1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
A sermon preached by the Rev. Adrienne Koch at Trinity Cathedral on the Day of Pentecost, May 28, 2023.
A sermon preached by the Rev. Adrienne Koch at Trinity Cathedral on the Day of Pentecost, May 28, 2023.
Paul’s writings subvert the need for a self-made Lord by giving the people who want a patriarch a new Lord to submit to: “Jesus is Lord,” writes Paul, in today’s epistle. Jesus is called Lord in our New Testament more than 700 times. Because that’s how often we need him to be Lord. Anyone who has experienced the twisted the moral values of dominance and submission through patriarchy, and slavery, and domestic violence, knows that we need a new Lord of the house.
Jesus preferred humility to hierarchy…Paul, the Pharisee, who knew Jewish law so well, saw what Jesus was trying to do, but after his death, Paul’s followers lost the radical reversal of the household codes that Jesus inspired, and Christians fell back onto the old cultural maps of their rabbis and the philosophers. And as the gospel began to be preached to the ends of the earth, the household codes hitched a ride with the good news of Jesus.
“Of household management we have seen that there are three parts,” writes Aristotle: the rule of a master over slaves, a husband over wife and father over children. Household management built on dominance and submission was propagated from the Greco-Roman empire, from the cradle of civilization, and built our world on the distorted moral value that one person should always be on top. These household codes not only made it into our homes but into our scriptures.
May 14, 2023 |
Wibbly-wobbly Timey-wimey Stuff
| The Rev. Adrienne KochWibbly-wobbly Timey-wimey Stuff
1 Peter 3:11-22
A sermon preached by the Rev. Adrienne Koch at Trinity Cathedral on the sixth Sunday of Easter 2023.
Whether it’s the Timelord, Doctor Who, or the trans warp conduits of Star Trek’s Borg or the middle-aged Chinese immigrant woman in the recent film Everything Everywhere All at Once, all these time and space traveling fantasy characters point us toward something true that writers of scripture have tried to convey before today’s theories of time-travel and the multiverse ever existed.The cross of Christ was an outside-of-time event.
Biblical Greek has two common words for time: chronos (chronological time) and kairos (now time). “Kairos” means something like “everything everywhere all at once.” And Kairos is used more often by writers of the New Testament than chronos because kairos describes God’s timing; eternal timing. Outside of chronological time kinda stuff. The Apostle Paul tells us in Romans, “At just the right Kairos… Christ died for the ungodly.” Christ’s death is a kairos moment, a now moment, a God-moment outside of time and space.
Baptism is a Christian’s entry point into the eternal sermon of Holy Saturday while in this life. Baptism allows us to begin living into Kairos time, now. And that’s really good news for us. But what’s really really good news for all people, The Gospel news, is that whenever and wherever human beings are, dead or alive, Christ always finds them.
May 07, 2023 |
Heaven and Hell on Earth
| The Very Rev. Bernard J. OwensHeaven and Hell on Earth
John 14:1-14
A sermon by the Very Rev. Bernard J Owens on May 7, 2023 at Trinity Cathedral.
A sermon by the Very Rev. Bernard J Owens on May 7, 2023 at Trinity Cathedral.
If you believe in a judgmental, exclusive, capricious God who uses eternity solely as leverage to make you behave, then you are almost certain to create some kind of hell for other people, and quite possibly yourself too.
If Jesus is our way, our truth, and our life, then we have a chance to create a little bit of heaven for those all around us, right here in the living present.
Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life; he offers a path a path that winds through this life and the next, that arcs through our prayers and our relationships and our worship and our love of our neighbor and our joy and our grief and our death and our resurrection.
Jesus is life, one of integration and grace that weaves together all facets of our lived and hoped-for reality into a single tapestry of love and compassion, one that is not by any means ripped apart by death.
There is no way to God or to heaven or to nirvana or to inner peace without incarnate, sacrificial, self-emptying love.
Apr 23, 2023 |
It is Now the Third Day
| The Rev. Adrienne KochIt is Now the Third Day
Luke 24: 13-35
A sermon preached by the Rev. Adrienne Koch Sunday, April 23, 2023
Jesus dies on Friday afternoon and rises by sunrise on Sunday, and this tells us that the third day is a metaphorical concept that does not depend upon 24-hour cycles or how many times the sun chases the moon. Jesus’ resurrection on the third day is like a compass pointing humanity toward where God is creating something new, and timing of the third day is always perfect, always right when it needs to be.
If circumstances in your life today have left you stranded in the pain and suffering of a Good Friday of the soul; If you feel like you’re still waiting in the darkness, the foreboding unknowing of Holy Saturday, let this third Sunday of Easter remind you that the third dayis still now; you haven’t missed Easter, your new life is pending, awaiting you to recognize as Pythagoras did, that "beatitude is found in the perfection of the numbers of the soul.”
My friends, it is NOW the third day. So let the strong arms of our Triune God, that Great Builder of the cosmos, carry your burdens away today. Jesus himself said told us that burdens are light for him to carry.
A sermon preached by the Rev. Adrienne Koch Sunday, April 23, 2023
Jesus dies on Friday afternoon and rises by sunrise on Sunday, and this tells us that the third day is a metaphorical concept that does not depend upon 24-hour cycles or how many times the sun chases the moon. Jesus’ resurrection on the third day is like a compass pointing humanity toward where God is creating something new, and timing of the third day is always perfect, always right when it needs to be.
If circumstances in your life today have left you stranded in the pain and suffering of a Good Friday of the soul; If you feel like you’re still waiting in the darkness, the foreboding unknowing of Holy Saturday, let this third Sunday of Easter remind you that the third dayis still now; you haven’t missed Easter, your new life is pending, awaiting you to recognize as Pythagoras did, that "beatitude is found in the perfection of the numbers of the soul.”
My friends, it is NOW the third day. So let the strong arms of our Triune God, that Great Builder of the cosmos, carry your burdens away today. Jesus himself said told us that burdens are light for him to carry.
Apr 16, 2023 |
Doubt is Fuel for Faith
| The Very Rev. Bernard J. OwensDoubt is Fuel for Faith
John 20:19-31
A sermon by the Very Rev. Bernard J Owens delivered April 16, 2023.
A sermon by the Very Rev. Bernard J Owens delivered April 16, 2023.
Jesus did say to Thomas “do not doubt but believe” but when we take a simplistic view of either doubt or belief then something expansive and generative gets downgraded to a crass dealbreaker. “Either/or” thinking has made us perpetually insecure in our relationship with God and produced a religion fearful of anything that would suggest doubt or uncertainty or even free thinking. The worst sins of religion get committed when that need for certainty is brittle and unyielding. When we are in a living relationship with something that is unknown or uncertain, doubt simply comes with the territory. It’s part of a growing comfort with moving through the dark, learning to trust the grace and love of God when certainty and clarity of vision are hard to come by. Doubt is fuel for faith: to have doubt is to have a living relationship with the unknown…and faith according to Thomas Merton means “integrating the known & the unknown into a living whole.
Apr 09, 2023 |
The Language of Joy
| The Very Rev. Bernard J. OwensThe Language of Joy
A sermon by the Very Rev. Bernard J Owens on Easter Sunday, 2023
Joy is what comes when we move through the valley of death and come out the other side to find new life waiting for us. Joy is not just a happy feeling, but what happens to our whole bodies, our whole selves, when we live our lives as moving not towards death, but towards the greater life. Every moment we feel joy, it’s like an eruption of realizing that life is really all about resurrection. Because of love, death is not the most powerful force in the universe. Because of love, we have new life. Because of love, we have joy. Even in the midst of the hardest of times, the love of God fills us with new life, and echoes with the hymns of joy.
Apr 02, 2023 |
The Means Are The Ends
| The Very Rev. Bernard J. OwensThe Means Are The Ends
A sermon by the Very Rev. Bernard J Owens on Palm Sunday April 2023.
If your means are violence, coercion, intimidation, or any other instrument that fails to respect the dignity of every human being, then you will be hard pressed to find any ends that truly justify the means. Our means – our actions - say far more about our ends than any manifesto or vision statement. Choose your means wisely, then, for they determine not just your path, but your destination. Suffering cannot just be cut away: we must go through it, we have to walk with one another when they are going through it. If we can’t move towards suffering, then we’ll just push it off onto others, and ultimately make it worse for ourselves. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Live by the gun, die by the gun, he would say to a nation willing to set human sacrifice on the altar of the second amendment. Six more in Nashville, 3 of them children. How Long, O Lord, How Long?