Sermons

"I have come to set fire to the earth, fire! Oh, I can’t wait to see it all up in flames! Do you think I've come to bring peace? No! Peace is boring! Strife, division! I've come to split up families, divide homes, turn father against son, mother against daughter. Fire! Fire!” Luke has, believe it or not, softened Jesus’ words, for in Matthew’s version Jesus sounds downright violent: "I came not to bring peace, but a sword." A sword!

More often than not, in everyday usage, “faith” is thought of as being the opposite of reason. Faith is how we believe in something that has no objective basis, “for which there is no proof,” as the dictionary has it. But from that perspective, one could “have faith” that Pluto is made of bleu cheese, or that the city of Richmond will grind to a halt tomorrow on account of a freak snowstorm. One might argue that faith in God is of a different sort than those outlandish examp

“Teach us to pray,” the disciples ask in this morning’s Gospel. Jesus usually teaches his disciples without their asking to be taught. But with prayer here, it’s different. In this case, the disciples know that they don’t know how to pray, at least they don’t know how to pray like Jesus, so they ask him for instruction.