“When we finally turned out the lights and went to bed, I discovered that there were glow-in-the-dark stars stuck all over their ceiling. I’d never noticed them all afternoon, but they’d been slowly getting charged up by the light around them, and now they were shining. Of course, I guess they’d been glowing all along. You just couldn’t notice it because of the bright lights, so it was only in the darkness that I’d realized they were there. The message, this first Sunday after Christmas, is simple: we are, all of us, glow-in-the-dark stars.”

“My generation invented the word, or acronym, ‘FOMO’ – fear of missing out, of being left out, say, of that group text planning a party. There is also, so I’ve learned, ‘FOJI,’ fear of joining in: “I would totally join in karaoking but I’m busy tonight”…Christmas allows us to dream dreams and risk and dare. Because, this evening, the Christ-child enters the defenses of our world, defenseless, and thereby disarms us. He disarms us of our fear of judgment. And his presence frees us up for what theologian James Alison called the ‘joy of being wrong.’ The Joy of Being Wrong: JOBW.”

“Some of you know that in my previous life before I was ordained I coached girls basketball. I would often stay up late and watch my favorite college and NBA teams play, and I’d record their plays in a notebook, and I’d use it with my team. The problem was that all the players I was watching on TV were very tall, very good, and could dunk. My JV Lady Eagles were not so gifted. And many a time I’d draw something up, telling which player would be Lebron, or who would be Kobe, and when it came time to execute, I’d be mystified, and I’d have the thought – that is not what I drew up. John is in a slightly more serious situation, but I imagine a similar thought coming to him now – Jesus, did you not see the play?”

“The Bible is not just one self-contained episode after another. It’s a huge narrative arc, told in different genres and languages across a millennium, a library of a thousand little stories that together tell one big story. And in Jesus, Paul claims in today’s reading from the letter to the Romans, God is writing us into the story.”

“When we talk about what we love about church—this church—we talk about our music program, we talk about Catechesis of the Good Shepherd for our children, or maybe about the simple elegance of the worship space and the way the light comes in. Each of these things might stick out to us, but of course it’s not these things we are drawn to, but what comes through them, what meets us in this space. We come here in search of peace, and we often find it. We come to church in search of Isaiah 2. We do not, it turns out, come to church in search of Matthew 24. That’s a weird gospel. ‘Keep awake, therefore; for you do not know what day your Lord is coming.’ I know it’s your favorite doctrine: the Second Coming of Christ.”

“The feast of Christ the King was established at a time when authoritarian regimes were on the rise and more and more people were accepting the idea that a strongman wielding violence and technology could bend morality and truth to his will. When we claim that Christ is King, we are claiming that even the most savvy dictator cannot define the truth; that the most powerful forces of this world, ‘whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities,’ are not the highest power; that however turbulent our times may be, the domain of darkness will never triumph over the kingdom of God.“

“A few years ago I served at a church with a weekly free community dinner. These dinners really brought the community together: we had suburban churches and synagogues serving food, we had our parishioners helping set up and clean up, and some of the folks who came regularly to dinner on Tuesdays also started attending worship on Sundays. And hanging on a banner above the doors into the parish hall were the Biblical words from today’s reading that had inspired it all: ‘Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.’ …NOT.”

“Over the time that I was here watching out my office window, I saw the most amazing thing happen over those four years. A change took place. And it’s because of beavers.” We were delighted to welcome back the Rev. Noah Evans to preach at Garrett’s institution as our new Rector—check out his sermon here!

“A pastor from South Africa, I once heard, says to all of us who seek to follow Jesus: ‘Never forget that everyone you meet sits by a pool of tears.’ The Book of Job—one of my favorite books of the Bible—is chock full of tears.”

“I don’t know whether the fact that the rich man knows Lazarus’s name should be the last nail in the coffin of his condemnation or the first sign of a possible transformation. I don’t know that the rich man, simply by knowing Lazarus’s name, would ever have grown to care for him in that way that he should. But I do know that if he never saw Lazarus’s wounds, never heard his growling stomach, never got proximate enough to know his name—he would never have grown to care for him at all.”

“I grew up a child of the '90s, which means I grew up watching the Home Alone movies. From an early age, I had the deep fear that I was going to star in a real-life Home Alone movie. And so, like Macauley Caulkin, I became a master of the booby trap. I would construct these elaborate traps with the primary unit of armor being a rubber band. I recalled this childhood fascination this past week as I found myself yet again thinking about Jesus’ teachings about money and possessions.”

“The image of the Good Shepherd is a nice one, but it turns out that not all lost sheep want to be found. It seems nice in theory to be found; but in reality nobody wants to be found out. Nobody wants to have their deepest secrets and their most hidden thoughts discovered. Nobody wants to be exposed for who they really are. God, of course, has always already found us out. And yet God’s response is not the destruction promised in Jeremiah, but the joy revealed in Jesus.”

“Perhaps that’s the question that Jesus gives to the crowd: ‘What are you carrying? How’s that working for you?’ And tucked within it is an invitation to carry the cross. Perhaps Jesus knows that we, as humans, don’t have a choice about carrying things. But maybe we do have a choice about what we carry.”

“Idolatry isn’t as hot a topic for us today as it was in Jeremiah’s time. I doubt that very many of us in this room have been tempted more than once a twice, for example, to sacrifice a bull before a statue of the god Baal. But the problem with idolatry isn’t really a problem of how you worship; it’s a problem of what you worship, what it is that you consider to be most worthy. And in that sense, I do think that there are idols that we worship in our society today.”

“First sermons are a little bit like first dates. Here I am: I want to do well. I want to come off as ‘just right’ – just funny enough, just insightful enough, wise but not lacking in spontaneity. There you are. Wanting to appear a healthy, fun-loving group of people with whom a young rector would love to spend years. But just as I was preparing for a crisp, polished sermon, just as I was hoping for a pleasant and straightforward message of God’s love – here comes Jesus interrupting it all: ‘I came to bring fire upon the earth; I didn’t come to bring peace, but a sword of division.’”