"Be The Bread"

Jesus saying he's the bread of life ("They who come to me never will hunger") always strikes me as a riddle. Do we ever feel permanently fed by our spiritual experiences? If we have to come back each week for a Eucharistic or doctrinal tuneup (and the church definitely hopes we will), where's the permanence in that? How's what God's serving any different from In-N-Out Burger? Fr. Tom Herbts and his brother Franciscans suggested one answer. In what St. Bonaventure called "the furnace of love," we become the bread and make of our lives and world what Fr. Tom called the very substance of heaven. My sermon for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost is here.

"David, Ryan, And Ben"

In one sentence, Ephesians 4:1-3, St. Paul teaches us how to make a lifetime of good decisions. Is it wise? Does it feel right? Does it promote unity? We can't always come up to Paul's standards, especially when these values come into conflict. David famously failed the test. This week at St. John's, though, we were thinking not of King David but teenaged David and two high school sophomores affiliated with out community, Ryan Janics and Ben Zauri, who are brimming with promise as David was while facing down the toughest challenges of their and their devoted parents' lives. My sermon for the 10th Sunday after Pentecost is here.

"It's The Cover-Up That Gets You"

"It's not the crime that gets you," Richard Nixon warned his White House aides 40 years ago this summer, after the Watergate break-in. "It's the cover-up." While he cited the Alger Hiss case as an example, the story of King David, Bathsheba, and her husband, Uriah, would've worked just as well. Most of us are covering something up. Since the morning of July 20 in Aurora, Colorado, we've experienced humanity at its worst and best. David embodies that tension as well. My sermon for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost is here.

Moonstruck

Perhaps because we're deeply conscious of our worst tendencies, our fascination with perpetrators can muffle compassion for victims. God staged the perfect death so we'd learn to love life as much as God does. My Good Friday sermon, "All About Jesus," is here.

You might not realize it (St. John's School seventh graders do), but it's the movement of the heavens that brings us modern people to church each Easter Sunday. My sermon for the Sunday of the Resurrection, "Moonstruck," is here.

The St. John's Choir's magnificent "Hallelujah," from Messiah, which sent us out into the world rejoicing in the power of the Spirit and God's love, is here.

Five Freedoms

During the Sundays in Lent at St. John's, we've considered the healing that comes from acceptance and the resulting freedom from idealization; the healing of faith and the freedom to relinquish control; the healing of revaluing and the freedom of free-flowing grace; the healing of our impatience and the freedom to wait; and finally the healing of death in Christ and the freedom to thrive. If only George Zimmerman had heeded Jesus Christ's teaching in John 12: "Those who love their life lose it." My sermon for the fifth Sunday in Lent is here.

Lent At St. John's: Healing And Freedom

The life of St. Patrick (what we know, and what we don't) provided an opportunity to sum up a month's teachings at St. John's on our Lenten themes of healing and freedom. My sermon for March 18, the fourth Sunday in Lent, including a wee bit of singing, is here.

An' a 1, An'a 2, An'a 3, Advent IV

After Sunday's wonderful Christmas pageant at St. John's (that's Brenna Hayden, as Mary the mother of our LORD, singing a solo as angel Emily Salvanera watched beatifically), we skipped the readings appointed for the fourth Sunday in Advent, which were all about paradox and perplexity, just like the Incarnation -- God spurning the mighty temple King David wanted to build, the astonishing miracle of St. Paul's universal ministry in the hidebound first century, and especially the Annunciation.

Here's the song I offered instead. I wish I could hum it for you. I probably wish this more than you wish to hear it. The congregation graciously joined in on the chorus. Think Calypso. Thanks to Andy Guilford for the balcony-eye photo:

[chorus]
We love Christmas, but here’s the thing
How can a baby be a king?
This Bible stuff, it seems to us
Is sometimes too mysterious

[2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16]
Joseph descended from David’s throne
Capernaum was his stepson’s home
No saint ever lived in poverty
Who understood that grace is free

[Romans 16:25-27]
You’d have found Paul too intense
The job God gave him was immense
The equity we still aim to achieve
In the apostles’ time, an impossibility

[Luke 1:26-38]
Love that transfigures time and space
Revealed at a single hour and place
The favored one’s perplexity
Should daily happen to you and me

St. Christopher's Mettle

David Frum on a great man of the middle:

If Christopher [Hitchens] quit the left...he never joined the right. Like his great hero George Orwell, he was a man whose most creative period of life was a period of constantly falling between two stools: his new hatred for George Galloway never dimmed his old animosity toward Henry Kissinger. He was for the Iraq war without ever much trusting or liking the leaders who led that war. The stock phrase of the 2000s on the right was "moral clarity." If moral clarity means hating cruelty and oppression, then Christopher Hitchens was above all things a man of moral clarity. But he was also a man of moral complexity, who would not submit to Lenin's demand that who says A must say B. Christopher was never more himself than when - after saying A - he adamantly refused to say B.

I wrote to Hitchens in June 2010, after I'd finished reading Hitch-22 and just before his cancer diagnosis. I never heard back. I'm not even sure I had the right address. Yesterday, before learning of his death, I'd been thinking of the e-mail as news came of the formal end of the U.S. war in Iraq:

Dear Mr. Hitchens:

Thank you for your wonderful memoir. I loved many things about it, but I'll confine my comments to some passages for which I was especially grateful.

As a seminarian, I preached a sermon about the Iraq war in the spring of 2003 (attached, not that you would possibly have time to read it) which, in our liberal Episcopal diocese, was viewed as bloodcurdlingly pro-war by virtue of not being antiwar. In the receiving line, a woman called me a liar for associating Saddam Hussein with Islamic totalitarianism. Since then, I've often wondered if I should've kept my intern's mouth shut, because of what our congregant said and also because of the way the war sometimes was going. Your summary of the evidence of Saddam's latter-day fundamentalism stanched one vein of second-guessing, and some patience about the ultimate outcome for the region and the people of Iraq should take care of the rest.

Thanks again.

Yours ever,

John Taylor

Sermons: "Fade To Black" And "Hallelujah!"

People just like us were honoring institutions and traditions they loved. They were tired and scared. They were trying to do their jobs and keep the peace. As they gave in to what social scientists call ethical fading, they had no idea that they were killing God. Would we? If we attend to the song of the risen Christ in our hearts, we don't actually have to worry about it. My sermons for Good Friday and Easter.

Sermon For Palm Sunday: "Three Paradoxes"

First is the paradox Christopher identified in kindergarten. Second is palms and passion on the same sunny morning. Third is hardest: The paradox of Christ itself. My Sunday sermon is here.

Wrapping Up Lent: "Destiny" And "Death"

What does the enlightened evangelist put in her kit bag for performing Christian witness in a skeptical age? During the first three weeks of Lent at St. John's, we packed a couple of books (the Bible and Book of Common Prayer), reconnected with the ancient mystery of our liturgy, and pondered our thirst and hunger as tools for ministry. Fourth up was honest reflection on the legacies of our parents. Finally, we realized that they minister best who accept the inevitability and powerlessness of death.

St. John's Sermon Recap: Lent So Far

At St. John's Episcopal Church, our Lenten walk began two weeks before the sacred season of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving as we examined our missionary vocations as "steward's of God's mysteries" and lights of God's kingdom. During the five Sundays in Lent, we're discussing five tools of our evangelical ministry: The resources of the Word, as students of the Bible bound together by The Book of Common Prayer; our liturgical worship as a faith bridge between things seen and things unseen; and an honest understanding of our thirst, our inmost desires, whether for acceptance, achievement, or wholeness. Tune in the next two weeks for destiny and death!

Sunday Sermon: "Lights Of The Son"

Putting Christ on a pedestal or relying on the church to run interference for us? That's natural enough. The Incarnation? God-in-us? That's scary. My sermon for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany is here.

Photo: Afternoon sky on Monday over the Episcopal Church of the Angels in Pasadena

Sunday Sermon: "God's Stewards"

It's easy for people who live in comfort to hear Jesus Christ's admonition against worrying about what we'll eat and wear. And yet he knows we'll rush to find something else to worry about, so his advice about the lilies of the field stands. Worry dilutes the potency of the priesthood of the baptized. Living into our holy duties as "stewards of God's mysteries" [I Cor. 4:1] is a lot easier if we feel safe, which is to say saved. If we know we're safe, we can afford to risk everything. My Sunday sermon is here.

Sunday Sermon: "Paul's Pilgrimage"

The six denominations in charge of Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulcher feud and bicker not because they're Christians but because they're human. They achieve an uneasy coexistence because they agree on only one thing: That Jesus died and rose from the dead somewhere on the rough stones buried a few meters under their feet. What's the rock that unifies our homes and communities despite the disturbances and conflicts inherent in the human experience? My Sunday sermon, in honor of our patron, St. John Proparoxytone, is here.

Sunday Sermon: "The Street Lights Are On"

The Epiphany light from the manager must have been wondrous. It surely shown in the faces of pilgrims Jan and Deb yesterday morning in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. But not every light bulb that goes off in our heads illuminates the path that goes in the right direction in our lives. Whether in the eyes of babies on their baptism day or from automatic weapons fire in a supermarket parking lot in Tucson, all the flashes of light we may see give us an opportunity to discern what is best for others as well as ourselves. My sermon for the first Sunday after the Epiphany is here.

Sunday Sermon: "Our Three Gifts"

Like the magi paying homage to the Bethlehem baby, we bring the things of the world and lay them before the altar of God. Our gold, frankincense, and myrrh may be nothing more glorious than a tendency toward anxiety, guilt, and an excessive preoccupation with what other people (such as park rangers) may think of us. Whatever we offer in faith, God can use for his glory. My sermon for the second Sunday after Christmas is here.

Christmas Sermons: Remembering Our "Wow"

When something great happens, we say, "Wow!" We certainly didn't expect it. We didn't necessarily deserve it. And before too long, we'll probably forget it. That's the only reason the church is here: As a temporary reminder of the world- and life-changing glory, grace, and mercy that even Christians are prone to forget. My Christmas sermon is here.

As for the wow of wows, the most important moment of revelation, the evangelists are all over the map, from the Resurrection to Bethlehem to the beginning of all things. When did you realize that the universe, despite all appearances to the contrary, was safe? When was your first Christmas? My sermon for the first Sunday after Christmas is here.

Sunday Sermon: "Bring A Friend"

John the Baptist was Christ's messenger; he was also Jesus's companion. At our annual convention last weekend, Bishop J. Jon Bruno (left) called on everyone in our Diocese to follow the Baptist's example of prophecy and companionship by inviting a friend to church. From +Jon's ailing friend and colleague, Bishop Bob Anderson, we heard a teaching we'll never forget about the companionship of the Spirit. My Sunday sermon is here (and apologies, Bishop Bob, for misstating the name of your beloved wife, Mary.)

(Last) Sunday's Sermon: "Barbarians"

Jesus Christ devotes a lot of effort to preparing his disciples (and thus us) for bad times, not just so we can better endure them but so we can capitalize on them for sake of the kingdom of God. In the 5th century, as the Roman Empire fell apart around him, Pope Leo, whom the Church remembers on Nov. 10, still managed to stand up for orthodoxy while helping keep Attila the Hun from sacking Rome (several saddlebags full of gold also helped). What do the barbarians at the gate look like in our time? My sermon from last Sunday is here.