Sermon and Baptism - Easter Day 2011

I finally managed to get a good video of a baptism at Messiah! The problem in the past has been finding a place to put the camera on a tripod ahead of time that wouldn't be blocked during the actual baptism. So this time I had a moment of inspiration and handed the camera to a friend of mine who happened to be there and whom I thought would be able to handle the camera without dropping it. (Yes, this was filmed with the Diocese's extra special camera that I have been learning to use.)

This video starts out with my sermon. Like all good Easter Day sermons it is relatively short (10 minutes) and high-energy. It relates baptism and resurrection and also seeks to make the resurrection hope real to people, not merely an abstraction. I have heard some preachers over preach on days like Easter, and I think that's one of the worst mistakes you can make. I kept it pretty loose, which also meant making a few rhetorical mistakes (nothing drastic or heretical, just not as neatly phrased as I might like). Anyway, feel free to fast-forward through that part if what you really want to see is how we do baptism at Messiah.

Alas, I did not get a good video of the blessing of water part of the rite. I also skipped over a little moment I had with the kids around the font where I talked to them a little about the meaning of baptism.



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Sermon - Lent 5 2011

Nancy is coming towards the end of her Internship at Church of The Messiah. I will be sad to see her go, she has been a great student. A quick learner, she has picked things up very quickly. For this, her next-to-last, sermon with us, I asked her to "do something different." Nancy is a very good preacher, but I wanted her to stretch herself beyond her comfort zone by doing something new and risky. She decided to go in the direction of using personal story, which is a particular preaching skill.

As it turns out, the texts for Lent 5A are all about death: Ezekiel and the Valley of Dry Bones, the raising of Lazarus, etc. So she bravely went down the road of disclosure and I think people were quite moved by it, I certainly was.



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Psalm 130 - Emergent Psalter

Here is Infinitely More (Allison Lynn and Gerald Fleming) performing Psalm 130 at Church of The Messiah on Lent 5. They are using The Emergent Psalter by Isaac Everett, which I have mentioned on my blog before. It's a very interesting resource for those of you looking for new ways to handle psalms.



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