Worship. Serve. Grow.

Sermons by The Rev. George Adamik (Page 24)

Waiting

So you’re at the checkout line at Harris Teeter or Food Lion. There’s a person in front of you and all their stuff has gone through. It’s time to pay. The person takes out their piece of plastic and puts it through. It’s always a debit or credit, or pays cash and there’s some problem…

Stay on the Wheel

The Gospel reading this morning really invites me, engages me, more than any of these other readings. It reminds me of some things I’ve shared with you before about some of the stages that religion can go through. Some of this is from Richard Rohr. You may remember my mentioning him. I want to put this in some sort of context. It’s that reading where Jesus says, “You’ve heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say…”

All Things Come of Thee O Lord

Have you ever heard the story of the rector who was preaching to the congregation on a Sunday, and it’s that time of the year that is stewardship, and a lot of the talk is about giving? The rector says to the congregation, “I have good news. We have all the money we need. We have all the money we need to do all that we need to do.” And the congregation looks a little puzzled. And the rector says, “But here’s the challenge: all the money is in your pockets…”

Annual Meeting 2011

Today is our annual meeting day. I apologize for this service starting later. This is the first time we’ve tried it between services so now we have some ideas about how we can tweak that a little better next year. What I want to do today is, rather that what you might call a regular homily, I will present some thoughts in the context of our annual meeting day. St. Paul’s has many blessings to be thankful for. But with those blessings also come challenges. And so this year, 2011, it certainly is a year of blessings and challenges. I want to share some information with you and put it in context to understand what we’re experiencing as well as that experience within the larger church…

God Is Not Out There

Good Evening and Merry Christmas. I’d like to offer a thought tonight. Many years ago when I was in the seminary one of my professors once said, “When you preach, just try to say one thing. Tonight I’d like to say one thing. I hope that when you leave here, that that one thing is something you take with you tonight. I’d like to do that by sharing some wisdom from two spiritual writers that I admire, Richard Rohr and Thomas Keating. Share two things from their lives that perhaps captured that one thing…

Jesus as a Disciple of John the Baptist

We have a special guest who’s going to be with us this morning, and taking that into consideration I’d like to share with you only a few thoughts, kind of a “homilette.” He’s certainly an odd kind of figure: John the Baptist. If you think about John the Baptist as we just heard in the Gospel reading, we have certain images in our mind. Oftentimes John is portrayed as being in the desert, oftentimes standing in a river, sometimes holding a staff, oftentimes wearing what looks like animal skins. He’s depicted in our gospel reading today as eating locusts and wild honey…

The Feast of Christ the King 2010

So you may ask, “Why are we reading about the crucifixion of Jesus in our Gospel today, the week before Thanksgiving, a little over four weeks until Christmas? What does this crucifixion story have to do with where we find ourselves? Isn’t this more of a Gospel reading we hear on Good Friday or somewhere around Easter time? Why are we reading it in November?” I’d like to talk a little about that; why the church gives us this reading today…

I Know Who I’m With

Sally was scheduled to preach this morning but she has caught that cold that seems to be going around, so we agreed that it would be better for her to stay home today. So to use a baseball image, we’re calling in a lefty from the bullpen and I’m coming to the mound here. I can’t assure that I have my fastball, but I’ll do my best to get it over the plate. I’d like to offer a couple of reflections from this gospel reading from Luke. It’s not the most comforting words in the world. Luke is writing at a time, probably in the eighties, when a real tragedy had occurred. That was the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, probably around 70 or 72 AD…

The Call to be Saints

Happy Feast Day! Today is the day we celebrate the Feast of All Saints, which actually was Monday but in the Episcopal tradition we celebrate that feast the Sunday following unless the Feast Day falls on a Sunday. This Feast of All Saints: it’s a day where we remember the call we all have to be saints and remind ourselves that a saint is not just someone who has gone into eternal life, but we too are called to be saints. The idea is that you don’t become a saint by dying, you become a saint by living…