This is a sermon on the topic of isolation. As you will have seen, its full title is: “How to Not Let Isolation Overtake You,” the second in our Eastertide sermon series. As I have been thinking about the topic over the past couple of weeks, however, it has become clear that that title is only part of the story. Because the way to not let isolation overtake you involves not the rejection of isolation, but its transformation into something else, which is solitude. And so it would be more complete to say that the title is really this: “Embracing Solitude: How to Not Let Isolation Overtake You.”
So I will say something about solitude, about how transforming isolation is a spiritual discipline, and about how solitude is really about cultivating a relationship with the living God. All of this demands spiritual maturity of the kind that can only be hard won. And none of it is merely the exercise of spending time alone.
Read moreHappy Easter everyone. We find ourselves now in the period which the authors of the church calendar call “Eastertide,” -tide being a suffix related etymologically to the word time. Eastertide is a season, a period of 50 days when Christians commemorate and celebrate the Cross, the tomb, and the resurrection of our Lord from the grave.
This is not without its irony, this particular year, when for the first time in the history of the Christian west, most churches were closed on Easter Day. And yet Easter has happened anyway, commemorated—as it always is—on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.
If anything, there is a lesson in the apparent disparity between the emptiness of our churches and our breathtaking proclamation that The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Read moreI would like to say something about Judas. He is, alongside Jesus and Pontius Pilate, probably the most consequential character in the story we will be hearing over the next few days. Dante has him at the very center of hell, along with Brutus and Cassius, where the three great traitors are gnawed on by Satan for all eternity. Neither we nor Jesus cannot avoid our encounter with Judas.
It is easy to cast Judas as a vile and selfish thief, a simple villain. But like most of history’s villains, there is a great deal of humanity to Judas and his story, and very little that is simple; and so there is something for us to learn from him, about ourselves, and about this strange and fearful time in which we find ourselves living. Because Judas is a cautionary tale of what can happen when things don’t go exactly the way we were expecting.
Read moreThe writer Casey Cep published a piece in the New Yorker at the end of March, as the coronavirus restrictions were coming into full force. Like your preacher, Cep holds a master’s degree in Divinity from Yale. Unlike your preacher, Cep was a Rhodes Scholar, giving her the distinction of being one of the few divinity graduates to have been a Rhodes Scholar. But never mind that.
Here is what she writes:
Read moreMy friends, we are living in extraordinary times. Virtually no one alive in the United States today has experienced a public threat of the sort that now faces us: deadly, invisible, and on the move. We are used to enemies we can see, which we can oppose with military and economic muscle, and it is very odd indeed to be asked to stay home, to have businesses ordered closed, while the sun shines outside and doctors and nurses occupy the front lines.
But we are not the first Americans to see such times, and certainly we are not the first Christians to do so either.
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