Ascension Written Sermons

The Rev. Robert P. Travis Ash Wednesday Sermon – Noon and 7pm Church of the Ascension, Knoxville TN 2/22/201 Scripture: Joel 2:1-2,12-17, Psalm 103:8-14, 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10, Matthew 6:1-6,16-21 Sermon Text: Every year when I come to Ash Wednesday, I struggle with the question of why we go around wearing crosses of ashes on our foreheads, when Jesus explicitly warns us not to “ disfigure (your) faces so as to show others that (you) are fasting.” This year I decided to look up the history of Ash Wednesday, and I was interested to learn, that up until about one thousand years ago, up to the eleventh century, The church used Ash Wednesday for those individuals whose sins had been so notorious, that they were excommunicated from Ash Wednesday through Maundy Thursday so that they could observe a public period of penitence for their sins. The imposition of ashes, happened in the service right before those penitents were asked to leave the church, so t...

The Rev. Amy Morehous Epiphany 6, Year B February 12, 2012 I'm not sure I’ve ever told you why David and I became Episcopal. We both grew up in different Methodist churches, but we must have made our way here somehow, right? Well, we’re Episcopal because we ran out of gas. (I'd like to say that's metaphorical, but it definitely isn't.) After moving back to Knoxville, we visited every Methodist church in town, but none of them were quite right. Frustrated, we finally decided to try another denomination. We decided to come here because we lived not too far away at the time. It was a hot summer day, and we were running a little low on gas, and a bit short on time. Rather than stop and get gas, and risk walking into a new place late, we thought we’d get gas on the way home. The service was nice, the music was beautiful and absolutely no one spoke to us. Not too unusual a first reception in the Episcopal church. We returned to our car to head back home, but when we turned t...

The Fifth Sunday After Epiphany February 5, 2012 Be Silent The Reverend Dr. Howard J. Hess I. Introduction: An Early Memory . Tucked deep in the back of a closet in a little used room of the house I grew up in was an old, forbidden object. My sister and I had been told not to go into this closet, but we often looked there to see if we could find early Christmas presents. Because it was forbidden, the closet held a special interest for us. One day buried in that closet we found a game box with a fortune teller’s picture and a strange word, Ouija, on the lid. The board inside had an arrow that would point to one or another symbol or a letter of the alphabet. We couldn’t figure out how to make it work, so we took it to our mother. When she saw it, she frowned, and with a very determined voice said that the game was evil and we shouldn’t play it. She took the game box, and although we thought she had hidden it in a new place, we could never find it again. I ...