St. Paul's Lockport Sermons

King David, from his palace in Jerusalem, heard that his eldest son, Absalom, had betrayed him. Angry with his father, Absalom had raised up many supporters for his own kingship and the people of Israel turned from David. Hearing reports of Absalom coming to Jerusalem, David had no choice but to leave. Leaving the city, David crossed the brook Kidron with his household and loyal foreign troops, an...

Memorials are an important part of our lives. It is not an exaggeration to say that the practice of gathering to remember, to memorialize things has been devastated in the past year. Perhaps this has helped you to realize how important these gatherings are in your life. These range from the common and personal, like birthdays, to one-time and personal, like funerals, to the community-wide events,...

Reading of the Passion of Our Lord from the Gospel according to St. Luke from the English Standard Version. Read at Holy Wednesday Matins, March 31, 2021.

Passion of Our Lord according to St. Mark, from the English Standard Version, recorded at Holy Tuesday Matins service.

Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to St. Matthew, read from the English Standard Version.

Today begins Holy Week. Why is it holy? It is holy because we set this week apart to hear and remember Jesus’ suffering and death for our sins, His Passion. This so we can look forward to and understand all the more the joy of Easter, Christ’s resurrection. So why is it a week? Well, for one thing these events did take place over a week. Jesus’ triumphal entry was on Sunday, His Last Supper the fo...

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. This creation of God in the very beginning, God’s absolute creation from nothing, was formless, empty, and dark. It was a formless mass uninhabitable by anything – plant, animal, angel or man. The human mind cannot comprehend the first undifferentiated creation, without distinction of matter or energy. Yet God was there, and the Spirit of God...

Often in life we have to make compromises. Sometimes this is to reach an agreement with an equal, sometimes in love of someone who we care for, but the hardest compromises come when we are forced to do so by someone who holds power over us. This last one was the case for the three young men in our reading tonight. Along with their friend Daniel, and most of the nation of Judah, these three men wer...

The great blessing of having the Bible, the Word of God, so accessible to us is that we can come back to it again and again to re-orient ourselves in the midst of life. To be ‘oriented’ is to be faced east, the way that our churches face, even if they face north like ours. It is to be set in the direction of Jesus Christ, our Sun of Righteousness who rises with healing in his wings. In his life, d...

When God saves there are always winners and losers. We sing every week to God in the Sanctus, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.” Sabaoth means hosts, armies, massive groups of soldiers. Our Lord is a Man of War, as the Song of Moses says. When God saves his people from evil, He truly does defeat evil. Those who oppose God, who oppress God’s people, will be on the receiving end of God’s might...

This Sunday, the Fourth Sunday in Lent, is traditionally seen as a little lighter than the rest of Lent. In some places the colors are changed to rose instead of violet to show the lightness of the week. The name of the Sunday, Laetare, means “Rejoice!” as we heard in the beginning of the introit today from Isaiah 66. Rejoicing isn’t something we usually associate with Lent, the time of repentance...

For one hundred years Noah preached to his neighbors to repent, for God was going to destroy the earth by water. The world was incredibly wicked, and no one but Noah and his family would survive. Noah was righteous before God and blameless among his generation, yet the least effective evangelist of all time. How did the world get to this point? Why was Noah’s message not heeded?

A popular ethical point of view today is that “the ends justifies the means.” That is to say that any action taken is ok as long as it is working toward a good end. Coupled with this is the common view that something is ok if “their heart was in the right place.” The supposed Christian version of this is “God knows my heart.” All of these statements take something that is objectively wrong and jus...

Now one way to sum up the message of the Bible in six words could be, “Kill the dragon, get the girl.” Now this implies that Someone is doing the work of killing and getting, and we’ll get to that, but certainly this theme comes through most clearly here in the beginning of the Bible and secondly at the end in Revelation. There’s certainly a reason for that as all things made good and innocent in...

Lent comes before Easter. Advent comes before Christmas. In the church calendar this fact is built in – God never gives anyone great fortune without first giving great hardship. We try hard to remove the curse of Adam, that all our work must involve toil and hardship. We want the benefit without the work. We want feasting without fasting. This is why we fall so often for the temptation of the devi...

We often think of Peter’s first sermon as the one at Pentecost. After the Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples, they see tongues of fire above them and begin to speak in many languages. Peter then preaches powerfully to the Jews who have gathered in Jerusalem and three thousand are baptized that day. What we hear in our lesson from Acts is before that. This is truly Peter’s first sermon, after Jes...

Sometimes when we think of Jesus as our God and Lord, which He is, we put Him into a place so beyond ourselves that it seems hard to relate to Him. When we view Jesus as one who is far beyond us in power, majesty, and glory, it is certainly easy to understand that He can do things for us. He rules for us, he died for us, he answers our prayer for us. This is good, but we cannot forget that Jesus i...

Some of the best stories in the Bible involve fasting and ashes. In the book of Esther, before Esther goes to speak to her husband, the king, she fasts, and her cousin Mordecai sits in sackcloth and ashes when he hears the Jews are going to be destroyed. Esther successfully convinces the king to save her people. In the book of Jonah, after Jonah gets spit out by the fish, he goes to Nineveh to pre...

Everyone has heard of Valentine’s Day, despite not being a government holiday, though depending on your relationship status and expectations of your significant other it can be a day look forward to with joy, fear and dread, or simple acknowledgement. Saint Valentine seems to be generally known, as the day is often called “St. Valentine’s Day” References to various legends about him saving Christi...

“All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass.” (1 Peter 1:24a) One doesn’t have to have been alive very long or very perceptive to recognize that almost nothing in this world lasts. Things that are extremely popular one day are forgotten the next. The newest tech item that is impossible to buy anywhere one day is found on shelves at Goodwill a few years later. The popular si...

The Feast of the Purification of Mary and Presentation of Our Lord may be one of the longest names for a feast day in the church year calendar, if not the longest. For many years in English-speaking churches it has been also known as Candlemas, like Christmas, but with candles, because it was the day the new candles were dedicated in the church, remembering Jesus as the “light to lighten the Genti...

The people of Israel may have been the most forgetful people ever. Four hundred years of slavery in Egypt, and God sends Moses to deliver them from it. They see the great work of God in the ten plagues, bringing the mightiest empire in the world to its knees while they remain secure in God’s care. Freed from Egypt, God leads them to the Red Sea, where He parts the waters so they can cross and drow...

After six days, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John to a high mountain by themselves. Like the six days which led to the culmination of creation, this sixth day leads to the culmination of Jesus’ earthly ministry. This is the peak, the highest he will go in glory in his ministry. After this, he heads to Jerusalem to suffer and die for our sins. As it was in Jesus’ life, so this Sunday celebrating t...

“This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.” In this final sentence of our gospel reading, we get the full summary of this lesson and why Jesus performed this miracle. Jesus, coming in humility, being God in human flesh, had not performed any miracle before this or shown his divine nature. Here at Cana he did so to show...

The baptism of Jesus is recounted in three of the gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and in John it is mentioned after already having happened. You can be sure that when an event in Jesus’ life is in all four gospels, it is important. Obviously it’s an important enough event that we have a whole Sunday dedicated to it. The Baptism of Our Lord is a key day that has many aspects that connect the othe...