All the Assembly Kept Silence

by | Jul 11, 2021 | America, democracy, economic justice, environment, evil, history, hope, inequality, justice, mass incarceratiom, militarism, race, racism, relinquishment, salvation, social justice, spiritual community, transformation

Download a PDF of this sermon Amos 7:7-15 • Acts 15:6-12 In 2008, a fragment of a sermon by Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ got clipped into the news cycle for some days. To the shock and awe of millions, that preacher, who was pastor...

Mammon and Mastery

by | Jul 15, 2012 | economic justice, inequality, sermon 2012

In 1908, Winston Churchill wrote, “The seed of Imperial ruin and national decay [lies in] the unnatural gap between the rich and the poor [and] the swift increase of vulgar . . . luxury.” In the same decade, Republican President Teddy Roosevelt said, “The supreme political task of our day is to drive the special interests out of our public life.” A generation later, his cousin President Franklin Roosevelt would offer that “political equality is meaningless in the face of economic inequality.” Justice Louis Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court framed his concern in ominous terms: “We can have a democracy, or we can have great wealth in the hands of a comparative few, but we cannot have both.”

All Fall Away

by | Apr 5, 2012 | criminal justice, disability, economic justice, hunger, identity, inequality, Lent, mass incarceratiom, sermon 2012, suffering

Now, though the hour is night and many are deep in the sleeps of denial and cynicism, of fear and self-betrayal, know this: Beneath the last garment that covers our life with kindness and community; at the base of bereavement; in the basement beneath the broken beams of all a person built or dreamed, there yet a mystery awaits: Your being, your eye, You absolute: irreducible, precious without price: being.