Sermons from August 2025
Radical Grace
This week we take our ninth and final step along the path of the prophetic tradition. Richard Rohr in his book, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage, reminds us that the prophet Ezekiel (perhaps one of the most quirky and eccentric prophets we have read) begins in usual prophetic fashion with anger but then turns to one of the clearest expressions of grace in the Hebrew Scriptures: namely, the people receiving a “new heart and…
The Alchemy of Tears
This week we take our eighth step along the path of the prophetic tradition. Richard Rohr in his book, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage, reminds us that there is only one book in the Bible named after an emotion: the book of Lamentations, an expression of the “tragic sense of life.” Author and storyteller Megan McKenna poignantly describes the grief bemoaned by the writer of Lamentations, … the universal nature of shared sadness, and…
Growing Toward Love
Richard Rohr in his book, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage, describes the path of the prophetic tradition by bringing into conversation the inspired, and sometime eccentric, prophets of the Hebrew Bible with the contemporary voices of people who have embodied this path in the world today. Rohr plots this path as one that moves from “righteous anger against injustice, grief for the world’s suffering, and finally, grace-filled love for everyone and everything.” Over the…
The Role of Anger
This week, our youth apprentices and interns from Table Farm ask us to consider the role of anger on the prophetic path as evidenced in the lives of the biblical prophet, Jeremiah, and modern-day prophet, Greta Thunberg. During their recent farm shifts, our youth explored the connection between anger and grief as an antecedent to hope. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg embodies these two seemingly opposite and challenging emotions, anger and grief, as she chastises world leaders for not taking…
Necessary Disorder
This week we take our fifth step along the path of the prophetic tradition. Richard Rohr suggests that the work of the prophet often includes creating a holy disorder to disrupt a dominant unjust order. So, as we travel along the path of the prophetic tradition, the goal is to dis-order and disrupt things just enough that a new just and merciful order can emerge. As Rohr suggests: Reforms rarely move directly from the existing order to a new order…
