Month: August 2015

True Religion?

Draughting Theology

This Sunday, as with every Proper 17 Sunday, we will pray that God might increase in us “true religion.”  Three years ago, when this collect happened to also join the lessons appointed for Proper 17 in Year B, I took the opportunity to preach on the subject of true religion with some help from my friend and professor, Diana Butler Bass, asking the question, “what is true religion?”

I’m pretty sure we aren’t praying for more expensive jeans

Three years later, I still find myself asking that question, especially in light of the lesson from James, which ends with these words that seem to capture the yin and the yang of religion, “If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows…

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Is God here?

God in the Midst of the City

The first parish I served as a priest is Holy Apostles, located in suburban Memphis.  When I arrived there, however, Holy Apostles wasn’t located anywhere.  I mean that geographically, not spiritually.  Holy Apostles had been planted in a city neighborhood in the early 1970s, and as the demographics of Memphis shifted over the years, the parish’s fortunes waxed and waned.  Some years before my arrival, Holy Apostles had shrunk precipitously and sold its church building.  For some years they’d rented worship space in a Presbyterian church parish hall.  Eventually, that church, too, was slated to close, and Holy Apostles once again became a shrinking band of wandering nomads.  The low point may have been the day the Mission Council formally interviewed me to be their new vicar at a Perkins Restaurant on Old Shelby Drive in the middle of Memphis, amidst waiters busing scrambled eggs and French toast.

Once I’d…

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Does this offend you?

That Blessed Dependancy

I share this three-year-old sermon in honor of my friend and colleague the Rev’d Canon Emily Hylden, who is often offensive–and whose offensiveness redounds to the greater good of her people and the greater glory of God.
Isenheim Red Background

Matthias Grunewald’s great Isenheim Altarpiece, powerfully depicting the offensiveness of the Cross.

A Sermon Preached on the 13th Sunday after Pentecost, August 26, 2012

By the Rev’d Dane E. Boston, The Parish of Christ Church, Greenwich, Connecticut

Texts: Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69

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“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Does this offend you? For the last four weeks, we have heard Gospel lessons and sermons based on the perplexing, scandalous, confusing, and outrageous words of Jesus: “I am the bread of life.” We began way back…

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Aug 24 – Saint Bartholomew

A Great Cloud of Witnesses

Aug 24 - Saint Bartholomew

Saint Bartholomew
Apostle
24 August NT

click here for books and othr items about Saint Bartholomew

From the Satucket Lectionary

The name “Bartholomew” appears in the New Testament only on lists of the names of the twelve apostles. This list normally is given as six pairs, and the third pair in each of the Synoptics is “Philip and Bartholomew” (M 10:3; P 3:18; L 6:14; but A 1:15).

John gives no list of the Twelve, but refers to more of them individually than the Synoptists. He does not name Bartholomew, but early in his account (John 1:43-50) he tells of the call to discipleship of a Nathaniel who is often supposed to be the same person. The reasoning is as follows: John’s Nathanael is introduced as one of the earliest followers of Jesus, and in terms which suggest that he became one of the Twelve. He is clearly not…

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