The Rev Alissa: Sermons

Send us Fan Mail "This is the commission that Jesus gives his community in the world, the little baby church, our ancestor. Forgive people, and love them. Forgive people and hold them fast, even when they doubt. Even when they don’t believe in the way that you do. " Preached for Christ Church, Warwick, NY text: John 20:19-31

Send us Fan Mail "Easter is not a fix, but it is an opening. Resurrection is an invitation.  It is a stone rolled away, opening up possibilities we could never have dreamed on our own, God’s possibilities for justice and hope, after trauma, for healing after brokenness, and for life after death." Preached for Trinity St. Paul, St. Simon, St John, New Rochelle, NY text: Mark 16:1-8

Send us Fan Mail "Friends, love isn’t a resource that can be used up or spent up. It isn’t all we need – Love is all we are. It is the engine that runs the world, the only action worth taking, the only identity worth living. " Text: John 13:1-17, 31b-35 Preached for St. Philip's, Harlem, New York

Send us Fan Mail "So if the resurrected and living body of Jesus is the answer – what is the question? Here it is: How do we survive, when the temple where we meet God and find our own identities as God’s people is destroyed? How can we be God’s people, if we don’t have a place to meet with God? " Preached for St. Philip's, Harlem, New York City. text: John 2:13-22

Send us Fan Mail "Change is a thing that happens – you move to a new city, lose a relationship, a messiah is baptized and named. Transition is the process of a human being responding to change, and it takes a lot longer to happen than the change itself. Becoming a Seattleite takes a lot longer than just moving to Seattle.  A breakup last a lot longer than the moment you call it quits. And, as...

Send us Fan Mail "Words create worlds. I think this is precisely what Jesus is about in our gospel reading tonight. We may be tempted, as humans who inhabit our particular culture to read the beatitudes and try to make them an individual prescription for who gets blessing and who doesn’t. For some of us this is the most obvious way to hear these words. But that is not what Jesus is up to, her...

Send us Fan Mail "This is how Jesus begins his big work of love and life and hope – with the one human being in front of him. This is how Jesus begins to author the story of God’s kingdom-  not with words but with an act of love, offering freedom and connection to the person who is yelling at him, and seems to be trying to take him down. " preached for St. John San Juan, Olympia text: Ma...

Send us Fan Mail "It is such a big project, to see the full humanity of every person and every type of person in our lives. And yet I think this is the project of the incarnation, the big idea of Jesus Christ’s enfleshing among us. " Text: 1 Samuel 3:1-20 preached at St. John San Juan, Olympia WA

Send us Fan Mail "One of the tasks of human existence is to figure out what to do with our own strangeness. Do we run from our shadows? Ignore them, try to erase or medicate them? Can we get close and somehow embrace the chaotic and unmanageable parts of who we are? " Text: Luke 2:1-20 Preached at St. John San Juan, Olympia, WA

Send us Fan Mail "Advent is a threshold moment – it is the deep breath before we are asked to step into renewed relationship with the mystery of God made flesh. We ritualize this threshold moment because we need practice, friends. We need practice noticing the invitation, and we need practice stepping through the door. " text: Isaiah 40:1-11 & Mark 1:1-8 preached for St. John San Jua...

Send us Fan Mail "This passage is not about despair, did you notice? And it is not about punishment – nowhere in it does Jesus say bad things will happen to those who fall asleep. It is about hope after horrible things. And it is about trusting that every moment is a moment where Jesus can show up, arrive, redeem, and bless us. It is about not allowing the crushing defeats of this world to di...

Send us Fan Mail “I know that when you and I hear words like eternal life or eternal punishment, our minds go straight to the afterlife – heaven and hell. But that’s not what eternal means – it doesn’t mean afterlife or even unending life. Eternal means without a beginning or an end. When Jesus talks about eternal life, he’s talking about knowing  God and participating in the life and love of God...

Send us Fan Mail "Here is this parable, asking you and I a question: what extravagant gift from God are you holding in your life today? And I’m not talking about how well you dance, or sing, or spit pillows. I am talking about the extravagant ability to love, to risk, to take heart in the face of great challenge, that has God given to you. I am talking about the deep well of forgiveness, or c...

Send us Fan Mail "How do we get ready for an unpredictable God? How do we prepare ourselves to be Christians in a world that, really, we cannot prepare for? How do we fill our lamps with oil so we can be providers of life and light when something new from God does show up? What do we do if and when God shows up and we can’t, when we don’t have the oil we need to really shine?" Preached a...

Send us Fan Mail "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength. Give God all your attention, Jesus tells us. The way you do that is to pay attention to the neighbor – to see hear, and attend to their needs, AND to pay attention to yourself, to your own baggage that may damage others if they don’t know it’s there. " Preached for St. John's, Olympia, WA te...

Send us Fan Mail "I think we humans want to pick a side because that feels like doing something. Then we can rage and judge and fight, and that also feels like doing something. But, is it? I wonder what we lose, when we accept the story that there are only two sides, only two options, only two ways to think or feel or act. Us or them. Right or wrong. Children get to live in safety here OR the...

Send us Fan Mail "I can get behind this – this idea that the kingdom of God is like a new beginning for a beloved child, that the kingdom of God is like a feast – a new beginning that is made better, that is made blessed by the sharing of food and drink with the people who belong. I like this, I can endorse this. Yes, this is what the kingdom of God is like. And we know that you cannot have a...

Send us Fan Mail "Over and over again in Exodus the people complain about their decision to follow God’s rescue plan for them, and Moses complains about the faithlessness and impatience of the people and yes sometimes God also gets frustrated (the Golden Calf situation comes to mind) but for the most part, like in our passage today, God just responds by providing for them. Water comes from  r...

Send us Fan Mail "God does not care about what you and I think is fair, and God will not love us more if we work harder. God cares about the world that God has made and the real, physical well-being of all the people in it. Which means that when the end of the day arrives and it is time to get paid, God is not asking what is fair but rather what is necessary for all people to experience healt...

Send us Fan Mail "Forgiveness in this context is not saying its okay for other people to hurt us. It’s not letting bad people off the hook. Forgiveness in the context of Christian faith is an act of imagination. It is trusting that we can imagine a future that is not controlled by the past. And it is the belief that every time we choose to forgive a new beginning is possible." Preached a...

Send us Fan Mail " While I imagine you and I are not deeply shocked and dismay around being told that what we eat cannot make us unpure in the eyes of God... I am going to bet that most of us  are  pretty uncomfortable with this second part of our gospel lesson, the part where a desperate mother throws herself in front of Jesus and he appears to tell her that she doesn’t belong, that God&apos...

Send us Fan Mail "There’s lots to be distracted by in this text: the drama, the sibling rivalry, the inept parenting, the annoying teenage boy. This is a story of our broken human family, writ small into the lives of one particular family, which is so often how it goes. But there is another force in this story, an almost hidden character who is even more powerful than sibling resentment, atte...

Send us Fan Mail "Once upon a time there were a people who had never had enough. They didn’t believe in enough. And why would they? They had eyes and ears and voices. They had never heard a story where there was enough of any one thing for everyone to have what they needed." Written and told for Church of the Apostles, Seattle WA text: Matthew 14:13-21 (COTA is a Lutheran-Episcopal emerg...

Send us Fan Mail "When I imagine Hagar and Ishmael leaving, walking away into the desert in the cool of the morning, I also imagine Abraham watching them go. Sarah, checking on Isaac and telling herself over and over that this is for her child’s good, that she had no other choice.  I imagine all the other people who belong to this family trying to feel safe, in the shadow of this absence.&quo...

Send us Fan Mail "God separates day from the night, and in doing so creates not just night and day but also dawn, and dusk, these lovely, liminal, in between times. God separates the sea from the dry land, and in doing so creates beaches, and river banks, and lakeshores – special places of wonder and biodiversity that live between the water and the land. God creates creatures and they are of...