Sermons from Saint John’s

I have to admit that four o’clock in the afternoon is not my favorite time of day. It’s not that beautiful moment when I first wake up and get to reward myself for climbing out of bed by making a cup of coffee and then climbing back in. It’s not five o’clock, when it’s time to head home and start cooking dinner, with most of the day’s work in the rearview mirror. By four o’clock, lunch was long en...

John didn’t think that he was the Messiah; he thought of himself as a prophet, preparing the way for the Messiah. And he’s often shown this way in Christian art: a typical Renaissance painting of John will show him with one finger pointing the way to Jesus. And yet there’s an uncomfortable truth about the story we read today. While we might expect that John, the “less important” figure, would be b...

There’s a perfect moment in the first season of the TV comedy The Office in which Michael Scott, reflects on the importance of generosity. For those who don’t know, the series is a pretend documentary about working life in a small office supply company in post-industrial Pennsylvania; Michael Scott is the loveable but completely over-the-top character played by the comedian Steve Carrell. So in th...

The story of the First Sunday after Christmas is the story of a child becoming part of a new family. But the child isn’t Jesus, and the family isn’t the Holy Family: the child is me! And, lest you think the bubble of my ego has finally burst, the child is also you, and you, and you—because the story of the First Sunday after Christmas is the story of the adoption of a whole host of children from a...

There’s something I love about reading the most cosmic and story of Jesus’ birth at the quietest service of the church year. On Christmas Eve, we celebrate the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, with a whole crowd of people singing carols that revel in the familiar details of the scene: the shepherds keeping watch in the fields, and the angels singing in the sky, and the babe lying in a manger. And the...

We all know the story of Christmas, in its ancient and its modern forms. We know about St. Mary and St. Joseph and St. Nicholas; the donkey and the journey and the sleigh. The shepherds in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night, and the children in the pageant dressed up like cows. The angels singing in the heavens as the babe lies in the manger; and the angel sitting atop the Christm...

John the Baptist is an unusual man. The story of his life couldn’t be more different from what any of us experience day to day. And yet, of all the people in the New Testament, John the Baptist has an experience of God that’s the most similar to ours.

"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit." (Romans 15:4–13) Amen. I almost want to end the sermon there, with Saint Paul’s beautiful words, written to the members of the early Christian church in Rome. He had never met them, but you can feel the love and compassion in his words. What a beautiful way to mark th...

Well, the cardboard cornucopias and tin-foil turkeys have been banished from the shelves. The first snow flurries have fallen. The Christmas tree is up in the window across the street from my office—in fact, the Christmas tree’s been up in Thompson Square for about three weeks by now! It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and so I want to turn my attention to the question I know that we’ve...

This isn’t how the story’s supposed to end. At least, this isn’t how the story of a hero on the rise usually goes. At some point, in the long process that leads from his betrayal to his trial, from his arrest to his death, something is supposed to happen. Jesus is supposed to act. In the Marvel version of the Life of Christ, this should be the climax of the first issue: at the moment of greatest s...

People come to church for various reasons. But not many people come to church because they want to suffer more. Some appreciate the chance, once a week, to sit in a beautiful place, to listen to music and poetry, and to be at peace. Some want to make the world become a better place, and know that the church is committed to peace and love. Some people who come to church because they want their fami...

We sometimes think of the saints as the superheroes of the faith, the extraordinary subset of Christians who actually manage to follow the challenging way of life Jesus just described. These are people like the soldier Saint Martin, who cut his own cloak in half on a cold winter’s night to share it with a poor a man begging on the street. People like the martyrs of the early church, who were revil...

One of the advantages of track and field as a sport is that I could tell you, at any given point in time, exactly how good I was. There are numbers still etched into my brain from track meets that took place when I was a teenager. I can tell you, to the hundredth of a second, my fastest-ever mile time, or how long it took me to run the only half marathon I’ve ever run, both fifteen years ago. The...

A long time ago, in a country far away, a young man tricked his father into writing his older brother out of his will. The brother was understandably upset. He started plotting his revenge, and their parents—desperate to avoid bloodshed and maybe a little unwilling to hold the man accountable for what he’d done—warned the young man about his brother’s plans and sent him away. Time passed. The two...

The term “wellness” has really taken off over the last few years. It’s common now to see “health and wellness” paired, where “health” means being in sound physical and mental condition, and “wellness” means something vaguer, but more holistic. So, for example, the “health center” at my alma mater, where you could go to the infirmary when you were too sick to stay in your dorm alone, or you could s...

The great Saint Francis of Assisi, whose memory we celebrated yesterday by blessing cats and dogs, was said to have possessed a faith so moving that he inspired the birds to sing in praise of God, a faith so strong that he eventually came to bear the marks of the cross in his own hands. In isolated churches in the small hill towns of Appalachia, certain preachers show their faith in God by handlin...

Have you heard the song that comes from today’s gospel?                         Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham,                         Rock my soul, in the bosom of Abraham,                         Rock my soul, in the bosom of Abraham,                         Oh, rock my soul. This song has been recorded by Peter, Paul & Mary and by Elvis, and it’s been sung in children’s ministries around...

For a long time, I’ve had the idea of writing a book called The Jesus MBA, offering some practical advice on money management from the world’s wisest man. In my imagination, it falls somewhere into that nebulous genre at the intersection of personal finance, self-help, and pop Christianity that seems to generate endless numbers of book sales. You would learn through parables instead of case studie...

Jesus tells these two parables in today’s gospel to show us what God’s forgiveness is like. When we go astray; when we fail to walk in Jesus’ way of love; when we do not love God with all our hearts, or we do not love our neighbors as ourselves—God doesn’t respond with wrath. When your willpower fails you completely, and you can’t stop yourself from slipping back into the same broken patterns as b...

So, I have a confession to make to all of you: my family and I are still in denial that it’s September, and so we stole away out of town for another short weekend the last couple of days. And we had a lovely time; and that’s what I have to confess to you, my deficiency as a disciple in recent days. I do not, in fact, hate my family. Maybe I shouldn’t make fun of what Jesus says. But you have to ad...

There’s something a little ironic about Jesus’ exhortation to humility in our Gospel reading today. Most of the time, when we say that someone is “humble,” we mean something like “modest” or “not boastful.” Humble people don’t speak very highly of themselves. They avoid fame and notoriety, especially if it comes from talking about how great they are. What they don’t usually do is to go around sayi...

A few years ago, the city of Swansea in Wales put up a new road sign. Now, the Welsh government wants to promote the Welsh language, so that it survives, and so things like road signs are required to be bilingual. But only about a quarter of the population actually speaks Welsh. And so it’s typical for a local government to have an in-house translator; most people working in the road-sign departme...

Before Jesus was born, it was prophesied that he would come “to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.” (Luke 1:79) At his birth, the angels sang, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth.” (Luke 2:14) During his ministry, Jesus ended more than one healing miracle with the words, “Your faith has saved you; go...

The word “faith” is a popular one these days, in part because it’s become a catch-all replacement for the words “religion” or “spirituality.” We talk about “people of faith” and “faith communities,” and sometimes “faith-based initiatives.” It’s become distilled into such a technical term that it’s occasionally absurd: I receive a “City of Boston Faith-Based Newsletter” from someone with the title...

We live in a world in which people are simultaneously hungry for a sense of meaning and purpose—and increasingly detached from traditional religion. This disconnect is so clear that you can actually measure it in survey data. Pew Research, for example, releases a regular Religious Landscape Survey. And in 2024, their data for Massachusetts show the following: 72% of Massachusetts residents believe...