Year A; 4 Easter; Good Shepherd Sunday, May 3, 2020 Psalm 23 A few years before my mother had the stroke that put her in a nursing home, she sat me down one day during a visit and handed me a folder. In it were a couple of her favorite childhood photos; darling photos of […]
Year A; 3 Easter; 4.26.2020 Luke 24:13-34 “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road…?” I’m remembering that it was Sunday, March 8 when we last gathered together at St. Paul’s to share Christ’s gift of bread and wine. By then, we knew that there […]
St. Paul’s Second Sunday in Easter, 4.19.2020 Preached by The Rev. Carolyn Eklund Year A; 2 Easter; 4.19.2020 John 20:19-31 Who among us has not felt like a scared disciple behind a closed door once or twice in these past four weeks?! Raise your hand. I, for one, am not raising my hand. […]
Year A: Easter Sunday, 4.12.2020 “Stay-at-home” John 20:1-18 Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen, indeed. Alleluia! Over these last weeks as we obeyed the “Stay-at-home” order, the body of Christ of St Paul’s has learned to gather, pray and serve in new ways. Young and old alike, we have learned to connect […]
Year A; Lent 5; 3.29.2020, Morning Prayer in a Time of Pandemic Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45 Well! There are no two better stories of death and recovery in all of Scripture!…bones deader than dead in Ezekiel’s dry bones vision and Jesus raising his good friend Lazarus from the dead. All is seemingly lost. “Our […]
Year A; Lent 4; 3.15.2020 (St. Paul’s is closed and this service includes only two EM’s, musician and me) John 4:5-42 Today, here in the St. Paul’s beautiful Nave, Brunswick, Maine. We are a small group leading “virtual worship.” We have set our chairs six feet apart from each other. We are practicing “social […]
Year A; Lent 2; 3.8.2020 John 3:1-17 Nicodemus! I love this guy! A learned, upstanding religious official lurking in the darkness like a teenager meeting with Jesus in secret so “the popular kids” wouldn’t see how serious he was. I first fell in love with him in the 1970s Franco Zeffirelli mini-series, “Jesus of […]
Year A; Ash Wednesday; 2.26.2020 My roommate in college was from a teeny-tiny town in north central Kansas. She was a legacy in our sorority. Her name was Mary. Her mother and three sisters were all in the same sorority. In my day in college, sorority girls wore make-up and dressed stylishly. In my […]
Year A; The Last Sunday After the Epiphany; 2.23.2020 Matthew 17:1-9 The Transfiguration Many of you know that I grew up in Kansas City, Kansas. It is on the eastern border of the state of Kansas. Missouri was only a few miles east. But, my family treated the western border of our state as […]
Year A; Epiphany 6; 2.16.2020 I Corinthians 3:1-9 One of the sites I’ll be visiting during my sabbatical this summer is the ancient city of Corinth. Christians know Corinth as one of the communities the Apostle Paul founded. Even those not familiar with Christianity might have heard about the Corinthians at a wedding when […]