Ascension Written Sermons

The Enemy Rob Gieselmann Epiph 5A, Feb 2, 2017 I was sitting on the back deck of our house in California.We lived on the side of a hill, so the deck overlooked the neighborhood and the valley below. It was Friday, my day off, and I was pretending to read a novel – only I had shut my eyes, and was daydreaming. Suddenly, in my dreams – or was it real? – I heard this most exquisite, symphonic sound. Now normally, I don’t like crows. They caw and cackle, they swarm, and they dive-bomb songbirds’ nests, to steal hatchlings.   They are murderers , which is, I suppose, why they call a flock of crows: a murder of crows. Only this particular murder of crows - sounded exquisite. And it was not a dream. Flying from the hills above me, now passing around me from both sides of the house, were well over a hundred crows, maybe two hundred - fanning out into the valley below. Their cawing was, if you can believe it,the most perfect natural sound I think I’ve ever heard… … despite the...

Joy and Hope Rob Gieselmann, Christmas 2016 (A) (rhinocerous joke: why do you never see a rhino hiding in a tree? They are so good at it) Broadcaster Alistair Cooke liked to tell the story about planning a Christmas entertainment show with Leonard Bernstein. You remember Leonard Bernstein - he conducted the New York Symphony and composed the scores for West Side Story, and Peter Pan.   The group was tossing   ideas around, when Cooke suggested they offer a shortened version of Handel’s Messiah – Cooke noted, a hackneyed idea, but people will like it nonetheless. Bernstein looked bewildered, and confessed: Messiah ? I don’t know the work. Imagine that, Leonard Bernstein unfamiliar with Handel’s Messiah. Somewhat ironically, Bernstein composed his own version of a faith symphony, years later, for the grand opening of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Bernstein aptly named his work, Mass, a postmodern interpretation of the Christian mass. At first, the enti...

Crosses and the Other Side Rob Gieselmann, Pent. 18C, Sept. 4, 2016 I remember a poem from years ago – Only I cannot recall the poet or the actual words of the poem – Age seems to have eroded my memory …But the poem left me with an image.   It is winter, and a man is walking through snowy woods late at night. He is walking backwards, away from his cottage, staring at the light shining through the front window of the cottage. As he walks backwards the light disappears from his view. He   stops – then walks back towards the cottage, and the light reappears. He reverses course again, and the light disappears. And he realizes, now, that there exists an invisible line dividing his sight – a perimeter beyond which the light is no longer perceivable. A circle within which he can see. *Jesus is traveling from his home in Galilee towards Jerusalem, through Samaria. Somewhere along the way, he crosses some invisible perimeter – he becomes the man in the ...