Sermon for the Sixth Sunday in Easter

May 29 2011 by the Rev. Kate Ekrem

“Always be ready to make your defense to anyone” – 1 Peter 3:15

Warning: today’s sermon is interactive! Mentally prepare yourself for talking with your neighbor in your pew.

Do you have an elevator speech? You know what I mean, the 30 second or 1 minute pitch about what’s important to you, when someone asks “what’s up with you” on an elevator? It’s generally what you’re selling or what you want your boss to think you’re doing in? I used to work in book publishing, where people actually did have elevator speeches. It was a tall office building, and everyone was always lobbying the boss

Sermon for Third Sunday in Easter

May 8, 2011 by the Rev. Kate Ekrem
Luke 24:13-35

Imagine you are Cleopas and his companion, walking during a spring evening towards Emmaus, a few miles down the road from Jerusalem. I always like to imagine that Cleopas’ companion is actually the wife of Cleopas mentioned a few times in the Gospels, that perhaps this is a married couple.  And perhaps they are having a little marital argument or discussion as they walk down the road, talking over what the heck just

Good Friday Sermon

Good Friday 2011

The Rev. Kate Ekrem

Last night we stripped the altar, took all the usual things out of the church. Our service today is also sort of bare bones, missing many elements, the others in an unfamiliar order. It too is stripped down, until nothing is left but the cross. In a little bit we’ll bring the cross forward and have the opportunity to kneel in front of it, or venerate it however we feel moved.

            It’s not always a comfortable thing to do, facing the cross is hard for us, but how much more emotional and terrible it was for those who were with Jesus that scary night, that awful day. By the time Jesus got to the cross, most of his friends were gone. Peter wasn’t there, most of the 12 were in hiding. Jesus’ mother was there. As any mother would be.

Sermon for Fourth Sunday in Lent

Lent 4 April 3, 2011, The Rev. Kate Ekrem

Scripture of the day is here.

Early Christians took baptismal preparation very seriously. Today, at our most perfunctory it can be just a quick meeting in the pastor’s study, but in those days it was three years of study and learning. All leading up to baptism at Easter, almost always at the Easter Vigil, the crown and pinnacle of the church year. The scripture passages we read on the Sundays of Lent were their textbook. And this story of the healing of the man born blind was one of the most important of the texts they studied. We know this because it appears more than 7 times in early catacomb art, generally as an illustration of baptism.

Water in the Desert

Hello friends,
One scripture passage I didn't get to in this Sunday's sermon was the one from Exodus, about Moses finding water in the desert for the thirsty People of Israel. It's a very thought-provoking story, though, and I think that's in part because we have so much in common with those thirsty complaining folks who gave Moses such a hard time. We worry. We're anxious. We think what we need is not going to be there for us. 


Moses stops at a place in the desert where there is no water. This is unusual -- desert nomads (like Moses's wife Zipporah, who was with them) usually traveled from oasis to oasis. It makes us wonder, why the unscheduled stop? Did they overextend themselves, or not go far enough? Did they run out of water because they didn't conserve it? Whatever the case, they got off track. 


And don't we get off track in similar ways? Unlike most of the world we have plentiful clean water, but we can sometimes pay insufficient attention to our own basic needs and resources. We over-extend or over-consume. Here it's water, but what about  time, energy, sleep, silence, play? Do we plan like nomads and move carefully from oasis to oasis, from sabbath to sabbath, or do we get stuck in the middle with nothing to drink, burnt out and exhausted, like these guys?

This Lent, make sure you plan plenty of time and replenishment at the oasis that you need.

Peace,
Kate
P.S. If such refreshment moves you to share with others, you might take a peak here.

Atonement Theology Unpacked.. a little bit

Dear friends,

Yesterday in my sermon I brought up the topic of atonement theology (i.e. how Jesus's death saves us) because I think it's something very important for practicing Christians to have a grasp of. In today's pluralistic society, it's more and more common that a friend might ask about what we believe, or have a mis-understanding of Christianity based on TV evangelists. Or maybe we ourselves have questions about how God could possibly need Jesus to die. I only just touched on the topic in my sermon, giving the highlights of three of the dozens of ways theologians explain atonement.

So here is some unpacking, and to keep you reading I've put my own favorite theory at the very end....

Sermon for Third Sunday in Lent

Hello friends,

Here is my sermon from yesterday. You can find the scripture readings here. I realize I opened a bit of a can of worms with all those atonement theologies (it was very hard to summarize!) so I'll post another blog post unpacking that a little more for those who are interested.

Sermon for March 27 2011 by the Rev. Kate Ekrem
If you’ve been reading the Redeemer blog, you know that last Sunday I got to have dinner with the youth group and we played “stump the priest.” And they did! Well, at least it’s easier than Crainium, but they asked some tough questions. But the one question I think I really did not give a good answer to was, what does it mean that Jesus saves us? We say he died for our sins, but how did his dying fix the problem of human sin?