August 31, 2014

Perhaps we're all a little bit Satan

Perhaps we’re all a little bit of the devil.

In our Gospel lesson today, Peter is doing one of the things he does best and not getting it. This time it is a little surprising because he had just seemed to get it when he declared Jesus the Christ and the Son of the living God.

Now however, Peter objects to the very idea of Jesus needing to die.

“Get behind me Satan! You are a stone that could make me stumble, for you are not thinking God’s thoughts but human thoughts!”

This is Peter, the rock on whom Jesus’s church is to be built, and he is called Satan!

If Peter is Satan, thinking human thoughts and not godly thoughts, then perhaps we’re all a bit of Satan.

May 11, 2014

The Gate to an Uncommon Life

by Lowell Chilton

Is Jesus really saying that only Christians get into heaven?

If we are to believe the megaphone on the street, then that is exactly what this text is saying. It is saying that our Hindu sisters and brothers will burn in eternal damnation. It is saying that our Jewish brothers and sisters don’t get to meet St. Peter. It is saying that our blood sacrifice has been paid, but only ours, not my grandfather’s because he was never baptized. It is saying that the murderer who makes a deathbed conversion and confession is saved but that the atheist who dies while serving in the PeaceCorps isn’t.

Did God come into the world and die at the hand of the world for just some of Creation?

Is that really the promise of the resurrection?

Is God’s grace really that limited?

January 26, 2014

I'm not with THOSE Christians.

by Lowell Chilton in sermon, faith, unity

To stop clarifying that “I’m not one of those Christians” and to simply and earnestly proclaim “I’m with Christ” would be a beautiful thing.

January 20, 2014

Agape: an active love

by Lowell Chilton

Nonviolent resistance should target the underlying forces of evil, of injustice, rather than the individual people who happen to be doing the evil. As Dr. King would often say to the people in the Montgomery protest, "We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may be unjust."

December 25, 2013

Being an Out Christian

by Lowell Chilton in faith, sermon, Christmas

The prologue to the Gospel of John is full of beautiful language and profound theology about Christ. In the midst of the connections to Greek and Jewish philosophy, the profound language about the Word and the relationship of Christ to God and to Man, it is really easy to miss the arrival of the first Out Christian.

May 19, 2013

This is Pentecost

by Lowell Chilton in sermon, unity, faith, community

Today we invite the spirit to come into our midst. What are we really asking for when we make that invitation? Are we asking for the comforting, consoling Spirit that surrounds us with the warmth of God’s love?

Deep down, we probably are.

This is not Pentecost.