“Love God with all your heart soul and mind. And love your neighbor as yourself. On these hang all the law and the prophets.

The Pharisees come at Jesus with a question about which commandment is the greatest. They are trying to trap Jesus. It’s actually a lawyer that asks the nitpicky question. It’s interesting to note that at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry he had 3 temptations put to him by the devil. Now a few days before his execution, at the end of Matthew’s gospel, in the last 3 weeks of readings, he has 3 tests offered by the religious authorities.”

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s. Or in the more familiar language: render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s.

From its beginnings as a minority religious community in the midst of Roman military rule to its status today as a majority faith in a secular American democracy, the church and state are like the odd old crotchety couple who have been in the neighborhood forever. It’s not at all clear that they should have gotten together in the first place, and it’s very difficult to tell what is really going on in the relationship, but given they’ve been seen together for so long, it’s awfully hard to imagine them not occupying the same space.

Full disclosure that when I looked at the lesson for this Sunday, I immediately made plans to preach the Exodus reading. It is one of my absolute favorite readings, and I’ll say a brief word about it later on, but after being in our Bible studies this week, and hearing the different perspectives on the church and politics I can’t resist the minefield.”

“The Gospel today is one of the harder, or perhaps harsher, ones in our lectionary, and many preachers choose to address it by preaching from the Epistle instead, with its familiar and comforting turns of phrase that seem to be part of the very air we breathe. Peace that passes all understanding. Truth, honor, justice, purity, and excellence as human attributes. We can settle into those words like a comfortable old sweater, or a down comforter on one of these cold mornings.”

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” (Matt. 11)

“Those words of Jesus in this morning’s Gospel reading are surely among the most comforting in the entire Bible. Lord knows, they hit me somewhere deep—because my burden this morning is a heavy one.

As your preacher this morning, I’m afraid I’m not here to offer comforting words. Rather, I’m here to tell the truth, as hard as it may be to hear. Because that’s what I owe each and every one of you. Because there is no such thing as any real comfort without facing the truth. I think the Gospel teaches us that.”

I remember a talk offered by a therapist in my first-year orientation to seminary, and I think the talk was something like, “How do I know if therapy is for me?” I really don’t remember what the therapist said – I was too busy sizing up the room, thinking about these, my future classmates, and also doing my own diagnostics. Scanning the room, everyone was so fit and sharp looking, everyone’s Nalgene had the coolest stickers. I thought to myself, “No way any of you need therapy.” Again, I don’t remember anything the therapist said but I do remember her response a question I asked her. Trying to appear like I was really engaged, and also psychologically subtle, I said, “I struggle distinguishing between what I need and what I want. I often feel like I need recognition, but when I get it, it’s not as satisfying as I want it to be.”

“In his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College “This is Water,” David Foster Wallace highlights the difficulty of giving attention and care to the most obvious, matter-of-fact, unmistakable aspects of our lives. He begins this address with a comical little parable about two fish. There were these two fish who are swimming along in the ocean, when a wise old fish swims by and shouts, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the heck is water?” Wallace’s speech, which I commend to you, is about the singular challenge raised by these two young fish: how do we as people gain the awareness, the attention to see and notice that most obvious and essential of things – the water in which we are immersed. For Wallace, it takes practice, prayer, and attention to gain the miracle of sight, to be able to see what is right in front you, and say, “This is water. This is water.”

Jesus’ parable for us this morning is like an icy splash of water onto his disciples faces – and he’s trying to shake them awake to recognize the water that is the Kingdom of God.”

“I have to say, after six months of a global pandemic, I'm in better physical shape than I've been in the last decade.

Like many people, I’ve been working from home on a fairly strange schedule. For most of the spring, I'd usually get up around 6:30 in the morning, drink a cup of coffee and answer emails or work on my laptop until around 8:30, then spend a couple of hours with Murray while Alice was in class. We spent the rainy month of April trading off between wandering around outside and logging on to Zoom. With libraries, coffee shops, and playgrounds closed, going for a run together was one of the few leisure activities we had left, other than playing with the grass clippings outside the Harvard observatory. And so Alice, Murray, and I spent most of the spring running from place to place with our stroller, discovering that a two-year-old makes an inspiring, albeit rude, track coach: “I want you to run faster!” “

“In my second sermon here—way back in September of 2018—I preached about my two pet turtles, the Song of Songs, and love. It was a pretty good sermon. I re-read that sermon a few weeks ago, because I wanted to know if anything had changed. I wanted to know much these two years of ministry alongside you had changed what I thought, had changed who I was.

Not very much, it turns out. And unimaginably.”