Sermons

June 25, 2023
Texts:
Galatians 5:1: It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
2 Corinthians 3:17: Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

June 18, 2023
Text: Matt 9:35 – 10:8
Our gospel reading for today begins in the middle of Jesus’ ministry. According to Matthew, the disciples who are sent out to teach and preach consist of twelve men who are specifically named. They are given spiritual power to heal and cast out demons. They are to travel light, depend on the welcome of “worthy” people, and simply leave if nobody responds to their teaching. This is a trial run, so to speak. A time to test their call. We don’t actually know how that turned out.
They have been traveling with Jesus for some time, listening to his teaching, watching his welcome for all kinds of people, and absorbing the practical, everyday meaning that God’s realm is close at hand.
Their message? God’s realm is not in the far distant future, reserved for a few scrupulous followers of the Law. That was a revolutionary teaching then, and it still is. Who can watch the news and believe that God’s realm is here and now? And yet, that is our hope and our common call as members of Eighth Day and in the wider Church of the Saviour community.

June 11, 2023
My family, our inner circle and I find ourselves in an extraordinary moment. My husband, best friend and partner of twenty years, Ava and Isabelle’s father, Kent and Carol’s son-in-law is in the process of walking towards God and physically departing from this worldly realm.
While I had hoped to talk about other things today, and slow roll our introduction into the community (and wrote two other sermons along the way trying to get to this one) after Kate Lasso’s teaching the other week, I realized that this time with you here today was meant to be spent introducing myself and my family to you.
So today I will share with you about the genesis of Bruce and me. It is my hope that you find pieces of yourself in us: pieces of love, of loss, pieces of The Other, that you can connect with, learn from, and allow you to see the divine within yourself and others with more color, more clarity.

June 4, 2023
Today, we come as a community to a particular annual discipline and liturgical practice. It is an intentional practice, our commitment/recommitment to membership in the Eighth Day Faith Community. It is a practice that defined the Church of the Saviour at its very beginning, a practice that continues to hold up the “integrity” of belonging to a spiritual community committed to following Jesus. This practice is a “discipline” as one of our founders, Elizabeth O’Connor stated in Call to Commitment. “Each year under God, we will review our commitment to this expression of the [Christian] Church. If we find at any time this doesn’t have meaning for us or we are automatically performing a ritual, we will not recommit.” (Call to Commitment, p. 37) This year is the 47th year that Eighth Day has celebrated recommitment. We are blessed that two of our founding members are still among us: Ann Barnet and David Dorsey, both of whom signed our membership book back on November 21, 1976.

May 21, 2023
Texts:
John 17:1-11
Acts: 1:6-14
We are using the First Nation’s version of the English Bible today.
John 17:1-11 relates the final prayer that Jesus (Creator Sets Free) offers for his disciples, just before he is betrayed and handed over to the soldiers, chief priests and Pharisees, leading to his torture and death, followed by his resurrection.
What is so compelling to me about John 17 is that, in this context of what lies before him, Jesus’ heart and attention are focused on his followers and who they will become, not immediately, but eventually, as told through the stories in the New Testament.

April 30, 2023
Text: Acts 2:42-47
Psalm 23
Introduction (Paul Fitch):
I am delighted that Karla Rivas and Reynaldo Dominguez are here with us visiting from Honduras, now nearing the end of a whirlwind tour of various cities in the US where they have shared from their struggle to create a better homeland for all, where no one is forced to leave to seek an uncertain future in this often-unwelcoming foreign land.
Karla Rivas is a journalist, editor, producer, and anchor for the Jesuit sponsored Radio Progreso Honduras, where she has worked for twenty-five years, producing critical analysis and reporting of the broad social and political context of her land. She is part of an incredible team of people who make up a truly excellent radio station and center for research, reflection, and communication in all of Central America. To do so entails levels of risk in a country unfriendly to such candid reporting. She is also coordinator of the Network with Migrants in Central America for Radio Progreso.
Reynaldo Dominguez is a small-scale farmer with a deep love for the land and for his community, Guapinol, which lies alongside the Guapinol River beneath mountains covered in lush tropical forest. He has also been a delegate of the word (Catholic lay leader) for 35 years.

Genesis 1: 26: God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, in our likeness.... So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them ... God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.
So God asserts that men and women are made in God's likeness.
How can it be that we are "like" the transcendent God of the universe? How can it be that humans are "like" a God who is pure Love, pure good? What can the old story in Genesis mean when we know that the story of human evolution is more or less correct? Where is God's likeness in people who don't care and have "outgrown" God? Where is God's likeness in people who have done unspeakable evil? We struggle with these questions.

April 9, 2023
Texts:
John 20:11-17
Colossians 1:25-27
The scripture read from John 20 is one of several times when the resurrected Christ was not immediately known to people who knew him and loved him well. Two other times are in John 21 along the seashore when he was cooking fish and asked Peter three times if he loved him; and in Luke 24, when he walked with the disciples on the road to Emmaus and wasn’t recognized for quite a while, even after a long discussion during that 7-mile trip.
When I was growing up, I viewed all of the Bible as equally inspired. When I stopped believing that God gave a dictation for each word in scripture, then I started to think of Mark as the most reliable Gospel, since it was written the earliest (about 70 AD) and Matthew and Luke were written afterwards, mainly based on Mark .

March 26, 2023
Texts:
Psalm 130
John 11:21-44
I know this is going to surprise many of you, but I want to start with a poem. The poem is written by Willie James Jennings, a poet and teacher whom I love. This poem is entitled, “Quilters,” after the women who came before us, who loved with their hands, who preserved what was deemed trivial.
Quilters
They sat in the ancient place
of the broken and bombed,
the torn and taken, the loss and lost
remembering
the shattering
pockets and bags filled
with remnants captured
by keen sight
able to touch what be not
as though it were
possible to make.
These multi-shaded women knew
their anointing,
the power to join
broken glass, torn hearts, pebbles large and small, bloodstained brick, pieces of
those aprons that smelled like fresh bread, flashes of sadness caught in song, the
extra fabric from the wedding dress, little napkins, quick melancholies,
bunches of laughter, shreds from curtains from soul windows.

Then with eyes aligned,
stepping out onto nothingness,
handling things that could
slice flesh, and pierce skin
they placed pieces side by side
unprecedented, but now
colors and shapes dancing
intricate new steps making
visible pulsating joy
never before imagined.

Then they decided in majestic wisdom to create soft shelter
against the cold, against threat, against forgetting caress,
and as the final threads joined, they saw what God wanted
to call good, but could not create.

March 19, 2023
In our scriptures for today, the Lord told Samuel to go out and look for a new King. In spite of Samuel's fear that King Saul would find out what he was doing and kill him, Samuel went — and he found David.
The blind man allowed Jesus to put paste on his eyes and did as Jesus instructed and went and washed his eyes — ridiculous, huh? And then the formerly blind man could see, and the citizens around him could finally see him! They said, “It is not him; it is someone else.” The formerly blind man said, "No, it's me. I am that man!” His whole world changed because he believed and acted faithfully.
And Paul admonishes the Ephesians: "So no more stumbling around. Get on with it! … Figure out what will please Christ and then do it."
Our scriptures this morning have a common theme: faithfulness in the face of danger and ridicule. AND, God's faithfulness as well.
In honor of International Women's Day, which was March 8th, and Women's History Month this month, I would like to talk about two women in the Bible who showed exceptional courage and faithfulness. Before I do, let me just list a few women in the Bible — out of many — who have often been held up as women of courage and action. Many, as mothers, played a crucial role in the life of their husbands and children.