Sermons

August 22, 2021

Last Sunday, Rebecca Wheaton offered us an exciting, fresh path into our worship theme for this season, “How Shall We Love?” She held up the image of ton glen meditation as a model of loving in the way Jesus taught: breathing  in the pain and suffering of others and breathing out love and compassion to help meet their needs. I could sense a deep resonance with this image during our time of reflection after the Word.

Sunday afternoon, when I returned to my own preparation for this reflection, I knew I needed to engage what I had just heard. I had been focusing on the text from Ephesians 6, where the followers of Jesus in Ephesus are counseled to “put on the whole armor of God” so that they may be able to stand against the “wiles of the devil.” That sounded sensible, particularly from the perspective of those turbulent times. But, as I’d been reflecting on “how shall we love,” I’d been wondering about finding a more loving way to describe the “armor of God.”

The metaphors Paul uses to describe “armor” made sense to those who heard them when they were written. Ephesus, a commercial city located across the Aegean Sea from Athens, was a center of Roman power in Asia Minor  Roman centurions would probably have been a common sight on the streets of Ephesus in those days.

Popular cultural images have certainly changed since late in the first century of the Christian era when this letter to the Ephesians was written. But Roman armor is still a  common metaphor for self-protection and domination of others. As I watched broadcasts of the Olympic Games last week there were movie previews with threatening images of figures in armor wielding swords, and V images of warriors urging me to buy something to make me stronger. The emphasis on defeating your enemy so you can force them to do what’s “right” is still pretty strong. And the news from Afghanistan emphasizes the enduring assumption that “Might makes right.”

August 15, 2021

May the reflections of my heart and the meditations of my soul be acceptable to this community and to the Holy Spirit. Thank you to Seekers for honoring and respecting that everyone here has an important role to play and voice to share. Please know that my relationship with Christ is very much alive in me. I came to Seekers Church from a Presbyterian-Methodist-Quaker and ultimately Tibetan Buddhist background. I always felt that Buddhism answered many questions and posed new horizons not met through previous Christian education. In addition to my devotion for the Buddha as a teacher, I have always felt that his teachings brought me closer to Jesus. As a healer, I want to know how Jesus healed and how his relationship with God was so open and vast. There have been a few times in my life when through the power of prayer, I have experienced the Holy Spirit enter my body, transmuting any sense of self-cherishing for a few moments. I believe Jesus lived and breathed selflessness. Both Christ and Buddha embody selflessness and perfect love, they are both my teachers and am sure they would have gotten along as brothers had their paths crossed in real time.

The title of my sermon is: Expanding on love & the practice of giving and receiving. There are two meditations in this sermon. The first is that our inherent nature is always good and saturated by love. The second is a reflection on Jesus’ ability to heal through taking on negativity and offering pure love.

So, let us start by releasing and relaxing our mind. As you take the next 5 deep breaths, please see the inside of your body as a wide, open sky. If any thoughts travel into your sky-like mind, simply label it as a cloud, a bird, a thought… and let it go. Focus on the sky, open, vast and blue. Your sky-like mind is a perfect container for love. Do you see? The foundation of your mind is perfect, like the sky.

August 8, 2021

Dave Lloyd made several important points about the limitations of the lectionary as a way of learning the Bible. The well intentioned lectionary authors give us the passages that they think are good sources for preaching and skip over a lot of stuff that seems to them to be distracting or negative, just the sort of entries that prompt questions, curiosity, and productive arguing with the texts.

I’m going to unpack the story of David’s ascension to become king of a combined twelve tribe coalition of Judah and Israel, plus territory of non-Jewish tribes. The three great kings of somewhat united Judah in the South and Israel in the North, Saul, David, and Solomon, ruled for less than one hundred years about a thousand years before the time of Jesus.

Saul was chosen to be king by Samuel the king-maker priest. Saul was portrayed as initially having the approval of God. Samuel, and Samuel’s imagination of God, turned against Saul because Saul did not follow the directions of Samuel. Without God’s imagined approval, Saul dies in battle against the Philistines.

As Dave Lloyd has pointed out, to understand a story it is important to understand who is telling the story. Today’s lectionary story is being told by Deuteronomic priests about 400 years after the death of David. They were writing during the rebuilding of Jerusalem and Judah after the return from captivity in Babylon. Samuel the priest is the hero of this priestly told story and is presented as warning the people against having a king, but then giving into the will of the people and selecting Saul as king, mentally unstable Saul from the small tribe of Benjamin.

August 1, 2021

This morning, Larry invited us to say goodbye to two of the children that have been part of Seekers for several years, as they are moving with their mother to her home country. Both of the boys, as well as their parents, spoke of what Seekers has meant to them, and Larry offered them all ribbons and blessings on behalf of the entire community.

The text of this sermon is not available.

July 25, 2021

As we just heard, in our Gospel reading for today there are two stories about Jesus doing impossible things. I’ll get to the second story, about Jesus walking on water, later. In the first story, Jesus creates a feast for thousands out of a couple of fish and a few pieces of pita, and when everybody had had enough to eat, there were twelve baskets full of leftovers.

There are a lot of stories about Jesus sharing food and drink with others. Whether turning water into wine for the wedding guests at Cana, dining with tax collectors and sinners in the house of Levi, eating an intimate meal with friends in the home of Mary and Martha, having grilled fish for breakfast on the shore with his surprised followers after they had seen him die on the cross, or, as in today’s Gospel, providing abundance where there seemed to be nothing, it is clear that Jesus knew sharing meals with others is important to human thriving.

While the story of the last supper that Jesus had with his disciples on the night before his passion and death is most closely connected to our celebration of Holy Communion — or what in other traditions is often called Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper — all of the stories in the various gospels in which Jesus is shown eating and drinking, as well as the parables that involve feasting or other meals, enrich our understanding of the symbolic meal that we call Communion.