Ascension Written Sermons

You Are One With Me and I With You     3rd Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, 6/28/14 Episcopal Church of the Ascension                        The Reverend Dr. Howard J. Hess I. Introduction . Our Gospel reading is very brief this morning – three verses that conclude the second section of Matthew 10. Matthew contains five blocks of material modeled after the five books of The Torah . This Gospel was written for a largely Jewish Christian audience who loved Torah and was steeped in its traditions. The second section of Matthew mirrors some of the core ideas of Exodus , the second Book of The Torah . Exodus is the book of liberation and journey and struggle to become a new nation. So we are to pay close attention to these three verses: Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me . . . and wh...

Trinity Sunday Jun 15, 2014 Christian Hawley Gen 1:1-2:4a 2Cor 13:11-13 Matt 28:16-20 So I’m going to try to convince us today that if we want to understand the Trinity better, we need to be watching the World Cup, the largest sporting event in the world that is going on right now in Brazil. I want to begin by saying that too often when we talk about the Trinity we get bogged down in all the bad math. We spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how to either extract three from one or cram three into one. And consequently the images we use to imagine the Trinity reflect our obsession with ones and threes. We have a triangle and a three-leafed clover and celtic knot and three bearded dudes sitting at a table (if you’re a Rublev icon fan). In all our obsession with numbers, we miss out on one of the most important revelations of Trinity which is that God, in God’s fullest expression, is a relationship. The radical power of the Trinity asks us ...