Sermon archive for category: Rev. Bernard Owens

I’d like to begin by talking about vestments. This alb that I wear – I should tell you that I bought this alb eight years ago. I was in seminary and I had to have one for my first parish where I was an intern. Just to let you know how space-age these things are, it’s kind of held together by a white shoestring that goes across on the inside. About six weeks ago I noticed that my alb string was becoming dangerously frayed. I turned to Candy and I asked, “What happens when it breaks?” Well it broke this morning..

Well I can report three sure signs that fall is approaching fast. One, I got to watch about two minutes of a very bad pre-season football game last night. Two, the acolytes were comparing the upcoming school schedules they had received this week with varying degrees of enthusiasm and dread. And three, as you passed through the narthex you probably noticed there were many opportunities to sign up for things…

Some of you may be familiar with a Steven Sondheim musical called “Into the Woods,” which is a retelling of many of the fairy tales that we’re all familiar with in a way that intersect one another so that new stories come out of it. The play begins with three story lines of some of these fairy tale characters who really deeply desire and ask for something…

When I hear of Jesus’ visit to the home of a Pharisee named Simon I imagine a somewhat formal setting. A Pharisee would have been a fairly important religious figure within that community, or at least regarded himself as important within that community. And when Jesus was invited, he was invited to sit at the table, and there were a number of people there with him…

Perhaps you noticed a similarity between two of the scripture passages we read this morning. The first we heard of Paul’s encounter with Lydia, Paul having heard in a vision an invitation to go to Macedonia where he goes and in Philippi he meets Lydia on the Sabbath…

This past January at our Diocesan Convention, the delegates, priests, and representatives from throughout the Diocese of North Carolina did something that I think is really exciting. Right next to our convention floor in a great big ballroom was set up a Stop Hunger Now workstation. And Bishop Curry set forth the ambitious goal for us to package 100,000 meals over the course of our two-day convention…

I would like to begin by sharing just a brief thought about my experience of being a witness, as we have all been witnesses, to what has been happening to our brothers and sisters in Haiti. My wife and I were particularly struck by the stories we heard on the news. This was two days and three days respectively after the earthquake had hit. And the story we kept hearing and the frustration we kept hearing was about was this sense of mounting outreach that was growing but simply couldn’t hit it’s target. Planes were in the air but there was nowhere for them to land…

In this week of recalling events from the past year and the past decade I remembered a story from about two years ago. It was something that involved all of us who live in this area of the country. I was thinking about the drought of 2007, the worst drought in over a hundred years…

At one point in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell describes the state of heightened awareness that police officers feel in moments when they have to burst through a door into a hallway or a building or a house where they feel like their life is going to be in danger…

In my adventures every summer to the Appalachian Mountains for our annual Appalachian Service Project trip, I picked up a piece of wisdom that’s one of the mottos of the young adults who teach the youth on these trips, and those of us who have limited construction experience. A motto to help us get through our particular situations when we are trying to fix something. The motto is this: “think like a raindrop.”…