When I was young, December always seemed like the longest month of the year. Despite all the excitement and bustle of the holiday season, it seemed like Christmas would never get here. From the day after Thanksgiving, when the whole family would be involved in baking the first batches of Christmas cookies (and we were finally allowed to play Fred Waring and…
St. James' Episcopal Church – Mt. Airy, Maryland
Sermons by Rev. Dr. Bill Doggett (Page 4)
It’s the last Sunday of the church year. Can you believe that Advent starts next week? Only 31 praying days left ‘til Christmas. And as the year winds to a close, our Sunday readings bring us to focus on last things, and the promise of ultimate transformation that God holds before us and the world.…
Be prepared! That’s Jesus’ message for today. Something you’ve probably been told many times throughout your life. If you are of a certain age, as I am, you were told in your youth to always carry a dime for a phone call. And then a quarter. And then thirty cents. And no really, younger folks, there actually used to be public telephones…
Today we celebrate All Saints Day. It was actually yesterday, but it’s one of those holidays on our church calendar that’s important enough to move around if it doesn’t fall on a Sunday so that we can all celebrate it together. The old name for this feast was “All Hallows’ Day,” and you can’t have…
With today’s gospel reading, the long debate between Jesus and the leaders of his religious community that has been unfolding in Matthew’s gospel that we have been reading for the last several weeks comes to an end with the assertion that after this no one dared to ask Jesus any more questions. As a former…
The middle part of Jesus’ parable of the wedding banquet is one of my favorites of all the stories Jesus tells. It really draws you in, doesn’t it? Who doesn’t like a party, after all. And this party is the one that all the really cool people got invited to. It’s like the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Except that…
The twenty-first chapter of Matthew’s gospel, which we have been reading from for two Sundays, depicts Jesus at his most confrontational. He’s just made that triumphal entry into Jerusalem that we remember on Palm Sunday, and he knows the leaders of his faith community are gunning for him, and yet he seems to be baiting…
Jesus’ story of the two sons in today’s Gospel lesson has special resonance for me, because I have two teenaged boys. Not that it’s common in my household for one of the boys to say he will not do something and then go ahead and do it anyway. But on almost a daily basis I…
This parable Jesus tells about the workers and their wages is kind of annoying, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not just the workers who were at it all day who feel there’s something not right here – the whole thing just doesn’t seem fair. For those of us raised in what we sometimes call the…
As I was preparing the sermon for this week, I was drawn to the reading from the letter of Paul to the church in Rome, first because of his snarky comments about vegetarians. I’m not as familiar with the epistles as I am with the gospels, and while it was clear that Paul was speaking…