A sermon on The Good Samaritan, Luke 10:25-37.
St. Philip the Deacon, Portland, Oregon
A sermon on The Good Samaritan, Luke 10:25-37. Preached at St. Philip the Deacon Episcopal Church, Portland, Oregon, on July 10th, 2022 by The Rev’d Maria Gwyn McDowell.
A Sermon given on the 19th Sunday after Pentecost
St. Michael & All Angels, Portland, Oregon
The violence we carry within us, the violence with which we respond to those around us, the violence on which our nation and world is built, all is judged in this story. Our hope lies not in a God who just does violence more fairly or justly or reasonably than we do it. Our hope rests in a God who calls us to refuse to participate in the injustice and cruelty, who stands with us as we suffer violence, who calls us to be a people of peace precisely because we follow a God of peace.
A Sermon given on the 11th Sunday after Pentecost
St. Michael & All Angels, Portland, Oregon
We will, at various times in our lives, stand either in the place of the woman or Jesus and his disciples. Sometimes, we will insist on being heard, we will refuse to be content with crumbs, we will persistently point out that the world is not what those with privilege and power say it is. We will speak out of abundance, and it will be hard. We may do it in our jobs, our families, among our friends. At other times, we will be on the receiving end of someone else's persistent cry for justice and mercy, and like the disciples, we will not really want to listen.
A Sermon given on Sunday, the 2nd week of Easter.
Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Portland, Oregon
In the Risen Christ we see that even death does not have the last word. And so, instead of cowering in fear, we can, like Jesus, speak peace to one another and to our world. Each one of us will do so in different ways and different places, but our best moment of speaking peace will most likely arise from those places where we have been scarred the most, where we have suffered or caused to suffer. We are our bodies, we are our relationships, and every body and every relationship is where and how we love one another, how we join with Jesus Christ, who trampled down death by death so that we could become to one another what God is to us: the embodiment of justice, mercy, peace, hope and joy.
A Sermon given on Maundy Thursday, 2017
St. Michael & All Angels, Portland, Oregon
In this meal, and in this time of washing feet together, where we wash one another's feet, we are doing what we are called to do all the time, every day, whether it's here among those who are our friends who mostly love us. Whether it is to strangers we do not know at all. Tonight is the night when we do the thing, not simply remember, but do that thing that makes us who it is that we are called to be as a community, as lovers of God, as lovers of our creation, as lovers of our neighbor.
A Sermon given on Sunday, the 6th week after Epiphany, 2017
St. Michael & All Angels, Portland, Oregon
We are arrows in the quiver of God, shot forth to arc towards justice, mercy, peace, and love. The arc of the universe does not bend itself towards justice. We bend it. We are the universe into which God in Christ enters, and it is our lives, our choice to persistently love one another, to make the beloved community present every day and in every place, that bends the arc of the universe towards justice.
A Sermon given on Sunday, the 16th week of Pentecost, 2016
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Oregon City, Oregon
Maybe this is why Kaepernick's actions and people's reaction stood out to me so much this week: protesting the death and violence with which people of color live in the United States earns condemnation because it makes us uncomfortable. I think many of us in the United States are much more ready to hear that we are supposed to hate our family (some of whom we are probably perfectly happy to hate because they are so very difficult) than that we should hate our country.
A Sermon given on Sunday, the 7th week of Pentecost, 2016
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Oregon City, Oregon
The giving of the kingdom that so delights God is the very kindness, generosity and justice that Jesus repeatedly ask that we give to one another. Jesus teaches us to pray by asking that this reign of God come, and then tells us over and over again that the reign of God is not a future event but a reality we make present by being God's presence to one another. The treasure in which we are asked to invest our hearts are those things that allow us to be like God, to be like the one who delights in serving us, eating with us, caring for us.
A Sermon given on Sunday, the 4th week of Pentecost, 2016
St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Oregon City, Oregon
What the woman offers Jesus is the equivalent of offering a guest something to drink when they arrive, a place to wash their hands before sitting to dinner, a chair to rest on after their trip over. It is the bottle of lotion next to the soap to moisturize your hands after washing. Bread and wine, like scented ointment in a world of chronic smelly feet and dry skin, are the stuff of normal, everyday life. Bread and wine are not exceptional foods, they are (at least for Palestinian Jews) a normal, mundane meal.
A Sermon given on Sunday, the 7th week of Easter, 2016
St. Paul Episcopal Church, Oregon City, Oregon
In Paul's response, we recognize how incomplete our efforts to love others are. We live in a world where sometimes there seems to be no perfectly good choice. In the slave girl, we recognize what it is like to be at the receiving end of perhaps thoughtless good intentions, the receiving end of someone else's help that may be true, but isn't enough, or just isn't what you need. Today we come together bracketed by a leave-taking and a promise, standing exactly where that slave-girl stood two millennia ago. We hope for the completion of what God has started, we wait, we are thirsty (Rev 22:17).
A Sermon given on Trinity Sunday, 2015
All Saints Episcopal Church, Portland, Oregon
We are made in the image of this God, who dances, births, knits, remakes, restores, who burns and blows where she will, all in order that we might be saved, that we might live as we are made to live. Salvation here is not *from* a wrathful God, but an invitation *into* being like God, to enter into a life of constant, joyful, dynamic hospitality. Being like God is to take God’s hospitality, and to be God’s hospitality.
Originally delivered as a part of St. Mary's Lenten Lecture Series 2004
St. Mary Orthodox Church, Cambridge, MA
There is a real danger that our fasting, our prayer, and even our alms-giving, becomes self-serving. These elements become our own private discipline, focusing on our own inner change, our own ‘salvation’ which may or may not press us to become people of greater love. I have often heard the argument that these disciplines are social because we do them together. We fast together, supporting and encouraging one another to walk past that oddly appealing hot dog. Our time in church increases, adding in Wednesday liturgy as well as the Friday akathist>. While the encouragement of the community is crucial to Lent, simply doing things together does not necessarily make us less self-focused, less individualistic. Lent can still be all about me.
Originally delivered as a part of St. Mary's Lenten Lecture Series 2003
St. Mary Orthodox Church, Cambridge, MA
What makes this particularly shocking, to the minds of both our Greek predecessors, and to our own more ‘modern’ instincts, the ‘world’ into which God became incarnate is ambiguous. The world changes all the time, our lives change all the time. There is nothing predictable about you or me, or the world we live in. My guess is that for most of us, hearing that the world is ambiguous does not put us at ease. It does not cause us to sit back, relax, and breathe a sigh of relief. Instead, a little knot of tension appears in our body, maybe we sit up a little straighter, we fold our arms in front of us in order to resist this uncomfortable idea that the world is ambiguous. But it is true, change happens. And rather than resist change, or automatically assume that change and ambiguity means ‘bad,’ we need to really think about what ‘ambiguity’ really means.
