Exactly eighteen months ago when I began my tenure as your Interim Rector, we all knew this day was coming. In fact, getting safely to this day, my last day with all of you, was the whole point of my being here at all. But knowing that a departure is coming doesn’t make it easier, at least not for me. The chairs…
St. James' Episcopal Church – Mt. Airy, Maryland
Sermons by Rev. Dr. Bill Doggett
As I said a couple of weeks ago, we don’t really know who wrote the letter to the Ephesians. It says at the beginning that it is from Paul, but most New Testament scholars, in studying the content, have decided that is unlikely. And we don’t really know to whom the letter was written. The…
You might, if you are the sort of person who likes the world to be orderly, have noticed that something has changed in the service this week. For most of the year we have been reading from Mark’s gospel – more or less in order when the festival seasons don’t demand something else, but here we are, on an ordinary Sunday, reading…
It is tempting, this Sunday, to skip the disturbing gospel lesson and the bizarre rhetoric of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians and focus on the simple story of the establishment of David as king over all of Israel and Judah in the first reading. There are resonances between David’s choice of Jerusalem as his…
Not only do we have two healing miracles in today’s gospel lesson, the stories are actually nested one within the other. Jesus is on his way to help one person in need when he gets interrupted by another one. And these are the last two of a group of three healing miracles in Mark’s gospel. Immediately before today’s lesson is not…
And Jesus said to them, ‘Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand all the parables? The sower sows the word. These are the ones on the path where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. And these are the ones sown on rocky ground:…
In today’s Gospel lesson, Mark tells us how Jesus began teaching in parables. As the summer goes on, we’ll be reading Mark’s gospel straight through, and you will get to hear plenty more of these stories – Mark reports that although Jesus gave explanations and interpretations to his disciples, to the general public he spoke only in parables. So just what is…
It is sorely tempting to ignore the famously difficult gospel lesson for today and focus entirely on the first reading from the book of Samuel, with its rather straightforward argument between God and the Israelites. I’m not going to give in to that temptation, but before we move on to Mark’s gospel, I do want to call your attention to the first…
Today is Trinity Sunday, the only commemoration in our church calendar that remembers a doctrine rather than a person or event. And it’s a difficult doctrine – if you want to know how difficult, how much it vexed the earliest Christian theologians, just turn to page 864 in the Book of Common Prayer, in the section of the book called Historical Documents…