Sermons for Proper 24, 2014: Baptismal and Eucharistic identities

 

God’s Peace and blessings to you all.

Moses is up on the mountain again, wanting to see God.  Paul’s bragging about the church in Thessalonica.  And Jesus is talking about taxes.  So what in God’s good name do all these have to do with Baptismal and Eucharistic theological identities?  Well, here are my sermons from this past Sunday for Proper 24 to answer that.  You can find the lectionary readings for track 1 HERE.

Since you can’t see the congregation in the audio, I’ll just let you know that when I asked all the cradle Episcopalians to raise their hands, we were the minority in the room.  That means, with overall numbers in the Church shrinking, and those coming into the Church later in life as the majority, then we are loosing at an even greater pace than the overall percentage those who are born into the Episcopal Church.  To rephrase that: we’re good at focusing on conversion later in life (maybe because the corporate model that the Church has adopted is only concerned about getting those new names on the roster to beef up apparent numbers), but we don’t know how to captivate our youth and young adults (or maybe because, following a corpora model of immediate return, the Church doesn’t want to invest time, energy, or resources into a population that can’t immediately tithe and give a return on the short-term investment).  This will certainly be a topic for a later post, but I leave it with you now to ponder with me why that might be…

Until then, here are my thoughts on the dual identities we find in our Church, starting back with William White and Samuel Seabury; identities of baptismal and eucharistic theologies, respectively.

8:30 Service

10:45 Service