This week I’m the guest preacher at Watch Hill Chapel in southwestern Rhode Island. As the guest preacher I have the option of choosing the lessons I want to use for the sermon, and this year, I used that option to change from the appointed texts in the lectionary to another text that allows me to preach on a topic that’s been on my mind quite a bit.

The text is from the Gospel of St. Mark, Chapter 1, verses 21-28. The sermon title is “Speaking with Authority”.

Here’s a taste of the sermon from my manuscript:

How does Jesus gain authority among the people he has come to lead out of bondage to freedom? Not by displays of power – or by testimony from other beings of power. (Notice that he commands such entities to silence.) He gains his authority by walking the way of the Cross, by demonstrating that even though he doesn’t need to do so, he will do exactly the same thing (and more) that he is asking of us – if we would be free of the things that have power over us, the unclean or misshapen authorities that use power to twist and to corrupt creation.

You can find a direct link to view the sermon here.

If you’d like to listen to a sermon on the Propers appointed for this weekend in the Episcopal Church’s Lectionary (The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost 2024), you can do that here. (It’s the sermon I preached three years ago on the Gospel account of the beheading of St. John the Baptist.)