Pentecost Sunday: Unified Diversity. Pentecost Sunday is a strange day on the church calendar because we want to celebrate, but the Acts reading about speaking in tongues and erratic spiritual experiences is a little unsettling. I’ve learned that if we talk too often about spiritual experiences, some people want to assign “labels” to us. Last week someone blasted me on Facebook (it’s not the first time…) for a comment I made on one Bishop Curry’s preaching videos. He preached that we need to stop being ashamed to talk about Jesus, and we need to all become…

Sermon: Seventh Sunday of Easter. Unity with God, Unity with Others. It’s the seventh Sunday of Easter, so I’ll begin with the truth this morning; I intended to preach from the Acts lesson about Paul and Silas in jail. “He’s in the jailhouse now.” was a great title! Then I would make a suitable joke about solidarity with Paul because both of us didn’t care for a jail cell. But there was a persistent nagging I couldn’t ignore. I couldn’t get away from the John passage about…

Do You Want to Get Well? Sermon for Sixth Sunday of Easter by Rian Adams A Sermon for the sixth Sunday of Easter..… A friend of mine is a retired Episcopal priest, but he was also a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst for over four decades. We have the best talks when I visit. Once he told me a story of a patient who would make a significant step forward, then step backward. This repeatedly happened over a year. She would finally process her relationship with her father, only to find another reason to get mad at him again…

Sermon Fifth Sunday of Easter: You’re Not Easy to Love By Rian Adams Sermon, Fifth Sunday of Easter: Let’s hear the voice of Jesus, “I’m going away, but I will leave you with a new commandment; you should love one another as I have loved you.” This Gospel is a rewind, Jesus said these words at the last supper. John set the scene with Jesus eating dinner with his friends. Judas left and went out into the darkness. Then Jesus taught the remaining disciples the secret of the kingdom.     I…

Hearing God Speak: The Fourth Sunday of Easter It’s the fourth Sunday of Easter already, where did the time go? I want to talk about a touchy subject, hearing the voice of God. It’s touchy because it’s not a simple formula. It’s hard to communicate. We think we‘re good at it, but we’re not. Twitter, texts, often miss the context. There is a difference between shallow conversation and deep communication. God desires the latter.  Deborah Tannen wrote a book on listening, its title is, Why I Can’t Hear…

The Third Sunday of Easter. Third Sunday of Easter… We are in the south, and I’m proud to be a southerner. However, I’ve learned something about us; fishing is serious. Sometimes we even have a way of embellishingsome of our fish stories.  As the old question goes: What is the difference between a hunter and a fisherman?  A hunter lies in wait, and a fisherman, he waits and lies. There‘s a reason people look suspiciously on a fisherman’s tales. Something about the sport lends itself to a certain amount of…