Sermons from St. Anne's in-the-Fields St. Anne's in-the-Fields Episcopal Church

“It feels like this is something of our last Sunday of the school year,
before we shift into summer mode next week with one 9am service. It’s also
like we are at this societal moment of pivoting out of COVID-19
restrictions and more or less going back to normal – if there ever was such
a thing. What’s been a bit disorienting for me was the radical abruptness
of reopening. It was like the CDC and our civic leaders just got tired of
the gray zone of semi-regulated communal life, and rather than slowly
undimming the lights, they just decided to flick the switch on, and many of
us, accustomed to the dark and coziness of quarantine, are squinting a
little bit, trying to acclimate to the bright lights of normal.”

“Imagine a Portrait Gallery approached you and wanted to capture your image
for posterity. How would you like to be portrayed? What picture of yourself
would you like others to see? And do you think that picture ties up at all
with the pictures others have of you? How would you be in this portrait?
Where would you be? What emotion, position, look would just capture you?”

“Human beings take around 650,000,000 breaths in their lifetime;

About 25,000 a day. How many of those are we aware?

My Apple watch rings once an hour with a reminder to Breathe.

It’s kind of annoying:

What does it think I’ve been doing for the last hour?

It doesn’t give me a reminder to tell my heart to pump blood

Or to my intestines to digest food.

Why does it suppose I’ve neglected my breath?”

“I am not a priest—I just poorly play one on Facebook live. My study of the
Bible is relatively recent and shallow—I didn’t find my way into regular
worship until I met Gene. Sure, my childhood featured Easter Sunday
services in fluffy Talbots dresses and two-weeks each summer of Vacation
Bible School… but those were less an expression of my belief in God than
they were my being easily bribed by flowery dresses and weeks of time at
Grandma’s house.

I’m not a rector, but Iama writer. I’ve consumed a lot of stories in all
sorts of different media. I love the craft of storytelling, and the tropes
and tools we writers use to tell a story right. That’s why I think I love
John’s gospel.”

“Our tradition provides us two holy books, two sacred texts, to shape our
spiritual imaginations. The first text is Holy Scripture – the Old and the
New Testaments containing the great story of salvation, providing us the
teachings of Jesus, and the examples of the earliest followers. The second
Sacred Text is the Book of Creation. We don’t normally think of creation as
a text, but all the elements are there. There are characters (both heroes
and villains), and landscapes, and family conflicts, and resolutions and
more bloody conflicts. And like any text, or book, it’s there for the
reader to interpret it. To try and make sense out of it. What’s it about?
Can we discern a plot?”

“Bertrand Russell, the famous British philosopher, once gave a public
lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and
how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of
stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at
the back of the room got up and said, “What you have told us is rubbish.
The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant
tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is
the tortoise standing on?” “You're very clever, young man, very clever,”
said the old lady. “But it's turtles all the way down!

Two millennia ago, while the Stoics, and the Platonists, and the
Aristotelians were holding forth about the motions of the planets and the
stars and the observable universe, in the back of the room, a little old
man stands up, and clears his throat, and says something so preposterous
you’d hardly believe it: it’s love all the way down.”