Recent Sermons

A popular item in Sunday Worship is the unpredictable Children's Sermon.

Click here to view Pastor Edward's September 11, 2001 Sermon.

A sermon preached on May 13, 2001, Mother's Day, based on John 13:31-35, entitled "Practicing Love in a Dis-connected, Self-destructive World"

Ron Delbene, in his book 'The Hunger of the Heart', tells the story of how at one point in his life he felt as though he was at some kind of critical crossroads in his spiritual journey and an intense need for some guidance. There was this wise old teacher from India who he knew to be something of a saint. Ron was living in Florida at the time, and he heard that this teacher had come to California to teach for a time, so on a west coast business trip Ron arranged to stay an extra day and rent a car in order to go and have a personal conference with this wise, saintly man.

He had written for an appointment, and the man's secretary had written back that Ron would be able to meet with the teacher at 4 p.m. on this particular day.

And so Ron was overjoyed. After driving two hours he arrived at the teacher's house. The teacher was delayed, however, so Ron was forced to wait for an hour and a half, until finally the teacher whisked into the room, apologizing for having kept Ron waiting. He sat down behind his desk and said, "Begin." For two hours Ron poured out his heart and mind to the teacher, telling him everything he felt the teacher needed to know in order to give him the ultimate answer. When he had finally finished, the teacher got up from his desk and pulled a chair very close to Ron --so close that their knees were touching.

"Now," the teacher said, "pay attention." Ron's heart drummed and his mouth went dry. He was certain the teacher was about to impart to him enlightenment. The teacher said simply,

"Pray unceasingly, go home, love your wife and children, and care for the people whom God has given you to care for... Now, let's go eat."

Stunned, Ron got up and followed the teacher to the dinner table. In a daze, he thought to himself, "For this 'advice' --this 'enlightenment' --I went to so much trouble?" He sat quietly through the meal feeling angry, tired, and confused. Following the meal he left, feeling frustrated and annoyed.

Back home the next day, he-told his wife every detail of the story. When he had finished, she leaned closely to Ron and said softly, "Thank God someone finally told you that!"

Ah, a mother's perspective! It is often the mothers of households who recognize the simple truth. Life is about caring for the people God has given us.

There is a certain simplicity to life that we tend to overlook. On the night before Jesus died, he wanted to pass on to his disciples wisdom to help them carry on without him --kind of like a mother on her death bed, speaking to her children collected beside her. Tenderly, Jesus addresses his disciples as "little children."

He said a lot of things during that night, but the most emphatic and practical advice is the words we hear in this morning's Gospel.

"I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another ."

So simple, and yet so easily neglected. The whole movement of our society is one that tends to pull us away this simple truth.

I read a distressing article recently about a tragedy that had befallen the middle class town of East Haddam Connecticut, a town not so unlike our own. About a year ago, two boys, ages 13 and 15, took a parent's car out late one night and did something they had apparently been planning for weeks: they drove the car at high speed into a tree, killing themselves. They had told their friends that they had intended to do this, but sworn the friends to secrecy. The friends had struggled with what their two friends had told them: amazingly their frinds' plan had made a certain sense to them - some had even thought about joining them in this act of self-destruction. Others had tried to find a way to stop their friends, but incredibly it had never occurred to any of them to tell an adult.

The suicide of teenagers exposes the lies inherent in the underlying values that drive our society. The kids who are harming themselves have, for the most part, everything they need materially and more.

When we believe that life is about acquiring money and pleasure and comfort we buy into a lie that is quite literally killing people. Kids who live in affluent homes are no less likely to harm themselves than kids in less affluent homes --in fact in some instances they are more likely to harm themselves. When achieving and climbing the ladder of success takes on an importance it does not deserve, young people wither under the pressures of competition.

Life is not about these things. It's not about acquiring money and comforts,

nor is it about winning. Life is about love. "Love one another," Jesus said, "as I have loved you."

Now, the word "love" is very misused word. We have abused the word, so that it has come to mean primarily a feeling --a warm, cuddly feeling of affection. But you can't command affection, as Jesus is here commanding. When Jesus is talking about love he means first of all concrete actions. Love is acting on behalf of our family members, our friends, our neighbors. Listening to one another's concerns... Giving a hand when necessary...Asking if there is anything we can do, and then doing accordingly.

Sociologists who study teen suicide tell us that kids are harming themselves because they don't feel connected to something larger than themselves -- to a family --or to a community that cares for them and to which they feel they truly belong.

The town of East Haddam, Conn. where these suicides took place is not unlike Parsippany. It's a community people move to in order to live in middle class comfort, while working somewhere else, typically moving away again within five years in pursuit of another job elsewhere in the country .Not really a community at all --rather a collection of strangers living beside one another.

Young people, it appears, are the most vulnerable to this sense of rootlessness and disconnection in our communities. A survey of students at the local middle school in East Haddam taken before the double suicide showed that a full 30 % of the eighth graders were depressed "all or most of the time." (I doubt that a survey of our local middle schools would be much different.)

"Love one another, as I have loved you." Shortly before Jesus said these words he had bathed his disciples feet. This, he was saying, is the stuff of love. You do these kinds of concrete actions, and feelings will follow --feelings of "being connected" to something larger than yourself --the sort of feelings that are missing in young people and others who harm themselves. But it begins with actions.

There's a touching story that has made the rounds of e-mails and the Chicken Soup of the soul books. In it a young man is writing to a friend to thank him for his friendship during High School. He reminds his friend how they met, how he was walking home carrying a ton of books, dropping them, when the other boy came along and helped pick the books up, then offered to help carry them as they walked together. They talked about ordinary stuff, and a friendship was born that day that was sustained throughout high school.

In the letter, the boy goes on to share the part of the story that he had never before spoken of: that the reason he was carrying so many books that day was because he had planned to kill himself that night, and didn't want anybody to have to clean out his locker after he was gone. The new friend's simple act of kindness had moved the boy to forgo his plans of self-destruction.

This is the stuff of love. Love begins, as they say, at home, with family members listening to one another. In too many homes, the old tradition of family members sitting down together each night around the supper table and talking about the events of the day has been lost. In many homes if people do sit down together for a meal, it is with a television on. It seems like a small thing, but I believe that if families across the country --(even when families consist of only two people) --if families could make a commitment to sit down together each night around the supper table, and stuck to it, because having not done it, it would seem strange at first, it would go a long way towards bringing back the glue that holds us together as a society.

But there is a need for more than just changes inside the family. Human beings have this spiritual need to be connected to something larger yet than their families - something life giving.

This of course, is what we as the church are supposed to be about: reaching out with acts of kindness and compassion that invite people to rediscover their deep, underlying connection to God. We are here to be a welcoming community that always has room in the circle for souls searching for a place of caring and belonging -- a place where we help point one another to the grace and love of God in our lives.

We want to do a better job of caring for our kids. Realizing how vulnerable our young people are, our Administrative Council recently decided to hire a Drew Seminary student during the next school year to minister specifically to our youth.

The article I read gave a moving account of the moms of the two boys who took their lives. They weren't bad moms. They cared about their children. In very real ways their children are the victims of a sick society --a society that is driven by values that aren't life giving. Broken to the core of their being, these two mothers have now devoted themselves to trying to reach out and care for other young people who might be tempted by these currents of isolation and despair that move through our society.

The mothers of the boys have become active in developing programs of suicide prevention --speaking to groups of youth, like a good shepherd seeking out the lost sheep. The article described the mothers writing down their phone numbers on scraps of paper and handing them out to the young people they speak to: "Call me," they say. "We care. Don't ever harm yourself."

One day Jesus will wipe away all the tears. Until then, he gives us his spirit, and commands us to "love one another, as I have loved you."

And that's why we're here.

A sermon preached on June 24, 2001 based on Luke 8:22-56, entitled "Why Do We Bring Children to Church?" and on the occasion of the baptism of Jessica Colletto and Children's Sunday. The children of our Sunday read the Gospel lesson as a dramatic reading.

You may be aware that there is this thing called the "lectionary", a schedule of scripture readings to be read in worship each given Sunday. Sometimes when I first look at the readings scheduled for the coming Sunday a connection to the things going on in the life of our congregation jumps out at me, and sometimes it doesn't. Such was the case this week. I knew that this Sunday we were going to be celebrating our children and baptizing little Jessica Colletto. I then opened this week's Gospel lesson and read the strange story of Jesus' encounter with a very unhappy man who was stark naked --living alone in a cemetery --and tormented by a "mob" of demons.

It struck me initially as an odd story to read on the happy occasion of a little baby's baptism, and I thought about chucking this week's lectionary reading and reading instead the story about how Jesus welcomed1he little children.

But if you give Scripture a chance, connections arise that were not evident at first, particularly if we allow the stories to get down into the deeper regions of heart and soul. One thing that occurred to me as a contemplated this sad, naked man was that once upon a time he, too was a naked little baby freshly brought forth from his mother's womb and held in his mother's arms --a bundle of love in whom all kinds of hopes and dreams were attached.

And from that beginning his life had taken the twists and turns that express in some sense the worst fears of parent --that our children might grow up find themselves in such anguish and torment.

I noticed that the story came as the second in a series of four stories which all, in their own way, expressed the kinds of things that haunt us as parents --that like those disciples out in a boat on a stormy sea our kids might find their lives swamped by forces of nature that threaten to sweep their life away; that like the woman with the flow of blood for twelve years our children might come down with some kind of debilitating, chronic illness; that the parents whose twelve year old daughter crossed the border from life to death, that our children might be taken from us before we ourselves depart from this life.

The stories give expression to our worst fears as parents. And as I read this story I found myself asking, why do we go to the trouble of bringing our children to church? Why don't we just sleep in on Sundays?

And at least part of the reason we bring our children to church is because of how deeply vulnerable we realize we are in this life.

The great privilege of being a pastor is that I get invited to be present to people in very special moments in the course of their lives. By virtue of my role I am invited to be present when babies are born and baptized, when people get married, when people pass from this world and people grieve. I am allowed to be with people when they are their most vulnerable, when their souls, in some sense, are most visible. It is a holy privilege.

Take weddings, for instance. Weddings are, of course, events of great beauty and joy, and yet there is always mixed in with the joy and beauty of a wedding a certain amount of pure fear --the palms of the bride and groom are always sweaty.

And I think for good reason. Marriage is a dangerous enterprise. Why do we hold weddings in the sacred space of church? We do so because the act of taking vows to another person for the rest our lives is extraordinarily humbling.

The love that is required to make a marriage a blessing and not a curse --a home full of peace and not full of demons --is a love that does not come naturally to us --self-absorbed creatures that we tend to be. Left to our own devices, we will surely fail at marriage, as so many marriages have. Dark forces – not unlike those known by the man living among the tombstones – are unleashed when romantic love turns sour. There is little rage, or sadness, or despair like that of lovers who have turned into enemies.

The people who have the greatest capacity to wound us in life and open up that abyss of dark forces within us are none other than the people we love the most. So when it comes time to enter into a marriage, we go to the holy space of church to humbly ask God to give us the grace to love in a way that gives life and not death.

And the same sort of thing holds true for birth and baptisms.

God made babies cute for a reason, so that against our better judgment we would bond to them --let them into our hearts --because otherwise, I think, we would run in terror of at the sight of them. If we thought seriously about the never-ending sacrifice that would be required of us in bringing these adorable children into the world --if we considered fully how vulnerable they will make us, who among us would not be tempted to run for cover?

What I mean is, we will spend the rest of our days giving, giving, giving to these little babies, and yet, if truth be told, despite all this giving, there are no guarantees in child raising. There are times when parents pour out their hearts as well as their pocketbooks on their children and nonetheless their children grow up to be in and out of drug rehab programs.

Baptisms, like weddings, like funerals bring us to this place of great vulnerability where we stand before a great abyss and all there is to hold onto is faith. We stand there and either we are overwhelmed by the terror of it all, or we take the leap and trust in the presence of the Lord, come what may.

And that, in a word, is what we're doing here today with little Jessica and all these other beautiful children before us. We are here because we realize that what our children need most --even more than a good education and good food and all those opportunities that the average American kid nowadays typically has laid out before them - -is an underlying sense that they are not alone, that God loves them, that God is with them, come what may; that life has an inherent meaning and purpose given to it by God.

And there is a final humility here, and that is that we can't actually give our kids the gift of faith. They will need to reach out to receive this gift for themselves. We can't force faith on them.

All we can do is do our best to carry out the vows all of us will take this morning in the baptism liturgy: to love these children and try to model for them what it means to live a life.

And part of what this means is intentionally passing on to our children these marvelous, powerful stories that give us our identity as a community of Christian faith.

Let them grow up with these powerful stories. Let the stories sink down into their psyches so they live down there in the deepest, darkest regions of their souls, so that maybe at those inevitable times in their lives when life seems like a storm and they are afraid they're going to sink down into the darkest depths, they will remember how once upon a time Jesus' disciples felt similarly terrorized and they awoke Jesus who was quietly asleep in their boat and he arose to silence the storm and bring this extraordinary peace upon the waters, and perhaps they will find in that memory something to hold onto.

And maybe somewhere down the road when they come to a time when they feel themselves pulled apart by dark feelings they cannot control --by rage and depression and despair --out of the dark regions of their soul a story will arise -- a story of a desperate, lonely man who lived with an overwhelming death wish brought on by a mob of dark spirits that were tormenting him, and how that man was visited one day by Jesus in whose presence he found the grace to live with serenity and peace, and the memory will give them hope.

And maybe somewhere down the line when perhaps they find themselves suffering from some sort of illness that the doctors can't figure out, and they feel their energy draining from them, and they wonder if they ever will feel better again, they will remember the story of a woman who hemorrhaged for twelve whole years --for whom doctors had not been able to do anything --and they will sense that healing comes from a place far deeper than the medications prescribed by doctors, and they will be moved to reach out in faith to the one who gives life.

And perhaps one day down the road, when they encounter the sadness of grief, they will remember a story about how Jesus called the life back into the body of a little girl, and they will sense that we are never out of the reach of God’s care.

That’s why we bring our children to church. That’s why we tell them the stories.