Sermon Archive

We invite you to reflect upon these sermons, offered at the Sunday morning service at the Princeton University Chapel.

We hope that you find them to be a resource to you in your own spiritual journey.

Sermons

Invited to the Party
Oct. 12, 2014

            We’ve all had it happen to us - someone tells us they’re going to do something, and then they don’t.  We tell the kids to clean their room; they say they will, and it doesn’t happen.  We ask a colleague if they want to help produce a project; they say yes, but never lift a finger to do any work on it.  We can reach an agreement with a fellow student to partner on an...

Food for the Journey
Sept. 21, 2014

I almost titled this sermon, “Stop Your Whining,” because both of our texts for today involve people who think that what they’re experiencing is so much less than what they deserve.  What kind of God leads them to a supposed freedom that turns out to be a desert where they’re hungry and thirsty all the time?  How can it be okay that a landowner pays the same daily wage to a guy who...

Finding Freedom
Sept. 14, 2014

Last April, during Holy Week, this Chapel hosted a performance of Hayden’s Seven Last Words of Christ, performed by the wonderful Brentano String Quartet.  Each musical rendition of Christ’s seven final utterances was preceded by a brief homily, and I offered the one on, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” I used a phrase (I did not make it up) during that reflection...

I Peter 2:18-25
May 18, 2014

I preach on the lectionary, the three-year cycle of biblical readings established by a number of scholars. It offers me structure; a through line, a diversity of topics; it challenges me to wrestle with texts that I might otherwise disregard. I have a confession to make in this regard: This week I tampered with the lectionary; I added the verse just before the passage that the scholars who created...

Going on Ahead of Us
April 20, 2014

Well, here we are again, my friends, on Easter morning.  Day has given way to day, month to month; the seasons have turned, and turned, and turned again; the winter was a rough one, but now again we find ourselves on this morning of all spring mornings, the day of the Lord’s resurrection.  The tomb is opened; all the dark and the dank inside of it, inside of us, is exposed to the...

The Things of the Spirit
April 6, 2014

Bones tell stories.   I have heard a few.  In August 2000, I walked with a group of students into a room full of bones in Guatemala City.  The bones had been recovered from mass graves around the country, bones left in the earth during the decades-long civil war between leftist insurgents and the government’s army; a war that killed, by the U.N.’s conservative estimate, over...

Looking On the Heart
March 30, 2014

A man comes into town, leading a young cow on a rope.  Everybody knows who he is – he is very well known and respected.  But people scurry inside.  They bolt their doors and shutters.  I wonder if the man’s expression is one of sorrow, or frustration, or fear.  He was feeling each of these things.  He had been sent into town on an errand he did not want to do, and for which...

Getting High
March 2, 2014

“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect.”   Oops!  Wrong opening line.  I should have said, “One day, Jesus of Nazareth was walking along with his pals when he decided to take them up a high mountain, and suddenly he started to glow as bright as the sun, and even his clothes were gleaming white.” ...

Choosing Life
Feb. 16, 2014

What does it mean to live “the good life”?  To many, a quick answer would center on leisure, luxury, aesthetics and beauty, lifestyle, comfort.  (I wouldn’t mind having these things myself!) To think of “the good life” in this way is to think about a pleasant life, one of ease and loveliness.  Another way is to think of “the good life” as one that embodies and inhabits...

Called Out
Jan. 26, 2014

Cast your mind back to when you applied to college (a few of you are not old enough; for others of you the memory will be fresh from last year; some of us will need to do some mental digging).  There were applications to be filled out, visits to various schools to see if they were the right fit, interviews, standardized tests, essays.  Whether we applied to one institution or to a...