The Rev Alissa: Sermons

Send us Fan Mail "The real question is how do we live, knowing that grief, death, and loss are part of the story? text: John 11:1-45 preached for Church of the Resurrection, Hopewell Junction, NY

Send us Fan Mail "The question before us is not what we will give up, but what kind of human being we will choose to be." text:Matthew 4:1-11 preached with All Saints Episcopal Church, Manhattan on February 22, 2026

Send us Fan Mail "What is so interesting to me in this is that surrounded by needs, and wants and longings, Jesus looks at his weird and wonderful congregation and doesn’t tell them to get something, or to become something or to do something – he tells them who, in his view, they already are. " Text: Matthew 5:13-20, Isaiah 58:1-9a, [9b-12] Preached with The Chapel of St. John the Divine...

Send us Fan Mail "We cannot expect our religion to save us if we do not remember our relationship with God and take seriously God’s desire for justice." Text: Micah 6:1-8, Matthew 5:1-12 preached for St Ignatius of Antioch, Manhattan, on Feb 1, 2026

Send us Fan Mail "There are things that we will never know. That can be discouraging, but it can also be motivating... I don't love it. I don't love this idea that we will never know. But this is how we begin our Advent season: in the strangeness, and the darkness, and just the straight up honesty that there are things we will never know." Text: Matthew 24:36-44 Preached at All...

Send us Fan Mail "We submit to God’s power by refusing to harm each other. We obey God’s power by rejecting the pressures of our world to punish, to win, or to control any part of God’s created world." text: Luke 23:33-43 preached at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, Pearl River, NY on Christ the King Sunday.

Send us Fan Mail " In this last night with his disciples before his big showdown with the Empire Jesus does not tease them, or intimidate them, or reassure them with a show of strength, or sign of power. Instead God incarnate puts a towel around his waist and serves them. And when he done scandalizing his friends with this act, he commands them to do the same, to love one another." text:...

Send us Fan Mail "We meet the mother of Jesus in this gospel not when she gives birth to his physical body, but when she gives birth to his ministry, at the wedding in Cana. The first time we see Jesus mother in John is at the beginning of the second chapter – “on the third day there was a wedding in Cana at Galilee and the mother of Jesus was there.”' text: Gospel of John, in particular...

Send us Fan Mail "Today Jesus gets to sit and eat with the people who mean the most to him. These are friends who have walked with him for the past three years, who have loved him through everything. Martha, Mary, Lazarus, his apostles, the ones who know him best, right now. His chosen family. Each one of them has struggled with the reality of who Jesus is, and how to love him." text:Joh...

Send us Fan Mail " I suppose I have some things in common with the elder son in this morning's gospel lesson. Whenever I encounter this parable I find myself feeling the most empathy for him – out there in the field fuming and feeling lost while his father celebrates the son who has done so much damage. It is not fair. If I could give this parable a name I might call it “The parable of t...

Send us Fan Mail "Maybe this is how we all perish, friends. By living as if we can earn love and favor from God by just being better than, or separate from, other people." text: Luke 13:1-9 preached for St. Paul's Staten Island, Third Sunday of Lent 2025

Send us Fan Mail "My least favorite version of the multi-verse is the one it feels like we are living in right now. It feels like people in our country are living in different universes from each other. I look at the world and see a disaster. My neighbor who voted very differently than me can look at the same world and think that finally everything is going pretty well. It feels like we are l...

Send us Fan Mail "How do we know who we are? How do we know what that means? One way is through reflection on scripture, and participation in worship – liturgies like this one, the First Sunday in Lent, where we encounter ourselves again and again in text and prayer and sacrament.  Another way is to recognize our own wilderness experiences, and to face our own tests." text: Luke 4:1-13 P...

Send us Fan Mail "This child is God, come to be with us in the midst of all our brokenness, in the midst of every deep dark sadness, in the midst of oppression and danger and heartache and despair. Jesus is with us. The child who has been brought to be blessed is a blessing. Here he is, our tiny vulnerable flame, alight in the dark." text: Luke 2:22-40 Preached for Candlemas Evensong, Th...

Send us Fan Mail "It has been said that every preacher only has one sermon. The one core value that will show up in some way in every sermon she preaches.  This morning we hear Jesus’ one sermon. In everything he says and does he will be preaching good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed.  This is who Jesus belongs to." text: Luke 4...

Send us Fan Mail "This epiphany season we are invited to imagine a God whose grace doesn’t need a reason to flow, a world where the waters of baptism flow into the wine of our feast without needing a broken body in between. That’s not our world, not the one we’ve got right now,  but it is God’s world – it is what we must imagine." Text: John 2:1-11 preached for Christ's Church, Rye,...

Send us Fan Mail "There is no one ritual that can make you perfect or worthy or whole, but there is one God who loves you enough to be with you – who shows up over and over in ordinary ways, through ordinary moments, and every religious practice we do together is meant to help us live like that is true." Text: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 Preachd for St. Philip's Harlem, NYC 9/1/2024

Send us Fan Mail "What is interesting to me is not that some people leave Jesus here when things get real. What is interesting is that some of them stay. Jesus lays out the reality – following him is about to get hard, they will need to not just be next to him, basking in the wonder of his signs and miracles. They will not get to remain as they are, in the general vicinity of Jesus. No, to be...

Send us Fan Mail “ We tend to think that belief means intellectual assent, or factual certainty. So if you hear that you need to believe in God, and in Jesus, you might think that you need to come to intellectual certainty about the existence of God or divinity of Jesus. We talk about ‘holding’ beliefs, as if they are ideas we put in boxes and save up. But just like the talk I give people about th...

Send us Fan Mail “ for us, for Christians, there is no choosing the spiritual over the physical. Christians do not get to pick and choose what a life to experience and what to escape, and we are not called to anywhere but where we actually are.” Text: John 6:51-58 Preached for St Paul’s, Pleasant Valley, NY 8/18/2024

Send us Fan Mail “ How was Bathsheba presented to  you, the first time her story crossed your awareness?  History and interpretation have been almost as cruel to this woman as her king  was.  She must have done something to provoke it – this is one of the most common tropes used to interpret this story. The innocent king driven mad by the seductress.  Here is another one: they were in love! Bathsh...

Send us Fan Mail "That’s the problem with strong men. It’s been a problem since the very first kingdom asked if they could have one. Strong men want to use the power we give them. They want to use the muscles they have. They want to provide borders and protection and they want to fight. So they make promises to us they cannot keep. They promise that we can feel safe. They promise that we don’...

Send us Fan Mail " Because of our Trinity, we have permission to always be looking for a third way – because that’s what God does, and that’s who God is. We have permission, right there in the mysterious and unfathomable nature of our God, to be curious instead of defensive when we encounter ways of being, and living, and loving that we do not understand. " text: John 3:1-17 preached at...

Send us Fan Mail "So here is the challenge: We will meet people on the path ahead who are not like us. Who do not share very many, or any of the identities that matter most to us. People who enjoy privilege we don’t, who defy norms we are used to. And some of those people, friends, are looking for Jesus. Some of those people are going to ask us the impossible question – what is to prevent me...

Send us Fan Mail "This Easter is harder to want, isn’t it? This is an Easter that is not about winning as much as it is about turning and re-orienting ourselves toward God and each other. This is an Easter that is less about a huge, visible victory and more about what happens to a small community of people when God passes through the locked doors of their fears, anxieties and expectations and...