Sermons by Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall (Page 26)
Creation’s Suffering
Today is Fauna or Animal Sunday, but I’m not going to talk about polar bears or about cats or coyotes. Instead I want to talk about pain. Last week, several of you spoke to me about the pain of seeing the oceans heating up and the water rising; the pain of knowing about the plight of sea mammals hurt by our trash. This is painful stuff. And it is right for us to feel the pain and difficulty that human…
Ocean Sunday
For most of the last two thousand years, theology has focused on our relationship with God and with each other. Now we are realizing that loving our neighbor includes loving the whole of creation. As a reflection of this we will be celebrating the Season of Creation during September. This is not yet part of the normal Anglican cycle but is a liturgical tradition started in Australia some twenty years ago. As we turn our attention more and more to…
The Holy Spirit
This morning we continue our series on the Nicene Creed by considering the work of the Holy Spirit. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. The church fathers who created the Nicene Creed were very concerned about the relationship between the persons of the Trinity. At the time, you will…
Looking for Heaven
It seems as though about every 500 years, the church gets to re-think its understandings of the ways of God in the light of contemporary science and society. The last time was the Protestant Reformation. We are currently living in one of those pivotal times. Times when the old wine skins can no longer hold the new wine and things seem to fall apart. Times when we get to reformulate the way we talk about the ways of God and…
For our sake…
This is Caro’s sermon from this morning; Fr Barry also spoke and his is only available as an mp3 file here. There’s a young man in my neighborhood who has just graduated from Poly. If you ask him he may tell you his name is Bill.[1] But that’s not his real name. His real name is Mohammed, and although his Mom is American, his Dad is from Saudi Arabia. I tell you this because after the horrific massacre in Nice…
Jesus the Christ
Today we come to the second part of our sermon series on the Nicene Creed and we’ll be looking at the relationship between God the Creator and Jesus the Christ. As I explained in my last sermon, this was a very difficult and contentious issue in the first few centuries of the Christian church, and became such a problem that it caused a big split. One of the reasons it was so divisive was that people thought that wrong belief…
Being an Apostle
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20 “The Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him…” In Greek, the word for ‘he sent’ is apesteilon which has the same root as the English word apostle. When we talk about “the apostles” we are usually referring to the disciples after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, when they were sent by Jesus to preach the gospel. But in today’s gospel reading, we see that apostleship is not limited to twelve men; 70, or some…
Putting a hand to the plow
Galatians 5:1,13-25 Luke 9:51-62 On Friday I went to a class at the gym. One of the benefits of taking a class is that you get to spend an entire hour looking at yourself in a full-length mirror. Consequently, as I was driving into San Luis afterwards I wondered what exactly it is going to take for me to lose weight again. Clearly, I thought, I am going to have to re-examine what I’m eating because I don’t have…
Breaking Through Barriers – May 15, 2016
Today we celebrate the day of Pentecost. Pentecost or Shavuot was a Jewish harvest festival celebrated fifty days after the Passover. Along with the Passover, this was one of the three great pilgrim festivals that brought devout Jews from all over the known world to Jerusalem in order to give thanks and praise to God. Repeated conquests had led generations of the people of Judea to flee to other countries. Consequently, hyphenated identities had evolved — Jewish Egyptians and Jewish…
We Believe
Today we start the first of a series of sermons, one a month, which will be covering that difficult issue, the Nicene Creed. The Creed is difficult for us for a number of reasons; it was written at a specific time and place to solve specific problems, and although it remains the one creed that is accepted by the Orthodox, Catholic and most Protestant churches, it turns many of us off. I have had people tell me they don’t come…