Sunday

Sermons

December 29, 2024 | Temple Visitations – Seeing Salvation in the Stranger

Speaker: Kate AndréText: Luke 2:21-40

Good morning, Columbus Mennonite Church!

Thanks, for inviting me to speak on this first Sunday in the Christmas season!

My name is Kate André. I’m the pastor of the Mennonite Congregation of Boston. 

I’m also Susan André’s daughter. 

I understand your Advent theme was “Visitations” — temporary but meaningful encounters. 

It’s fitting, then, that I, a visitor to your church, am the last person to sermonize about visitations.

So far in your Narrative Lectionary journey this month, 

angels have visited, family members have (Mary and Elizabeth)…

But in today’s Gospel story, as Jesus first crosses the threshold into the Temple– 

an intentionally sacred space not entirely unlike this one– 

a visitation occurs between intergenerational strangers. 

Before we dive into the story, let’s take a few deep breaths, 

calling our hearts and minds to the Spirit of Life in our midst. 

As you breathe, notice what words from the following Jan Richardson meditation resonate with you today:

I am still fascinated by thresholds– 

those places that lie between the life we have known and the life ahead of us. 

I am continually intrigued – and eager, and fearful, and amazed, and mystified – 

to enter into those spaces where we have left the landscape of the familiar, the habitual, 

and stand poised at the edge of a terrain whose contours we can hardly see or imagine… 

A threshold invites and calls us to stop. To take a look around. To imagine. To dream. To question. To pray.  

“May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, 

our strength and our redeemer.”

Here’s a fun fact: In the late 2000s, I was unfamiliar with the Mennonite tradition.

But my mother was a new member of CMC, so I came with her to worship whenever I visited from out of town.

On Christmas Eve 2009, I sat right there at your…

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December 22 | Advent 4 | The Visitation

Text: Luke 1:26-30; 39-45,56

Speaker: Joel Miller

Perhaps you’ve heard, our Advent theme is Visitations.  Doorbells, eagles, angels, a storyteller with a backpack, and an impromptu choir singing “And the Glory of the Lord” have all made an appearance this season.  Visitations come in many forms.

And of all the stories leading up to the birth of Jesus, it’s Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, that the church has remembered as The Visitation.  It has its own feast day, for Catholics and Eastern Orthodox.  The Visitation has inspired artists, famous and not, to capture the moment these two pregnant women meet in the home of Elizabeth in the Judean highlands.  Mary, young, is newly pregnant.  Elizabeth, less young, is six months along.  Even outside the realm of the miraculous, they could have been 30 years apart in age.

Mary has traveled “with haste,” Luke writes, all the way from Nazareth, a journey of perhaps 90 miles, maybe 100.  Why so urgent?  How hard did she push it – the animal, her own legs – to arrive as quickly as possible? 

When she did arrive, she entered the home and greeted Elizabeth, her relative.  No text messages in advance that she was coming.  No doorbell.  Mary greeted Elizabeth.  And Elizabeth greeted Mary.  Elizabeth felt the child within her leap, or kick, or a fist pump, or whatever it was.  Elizabeth calls Mary blessed, and blesses her with hospitality for three months. 

This is the Visitation.  There are no angels.  Just these two women and the children they will soon birth.

This piece you see is by Franciscan Brother Mickey McGrath.  He titled it “Windsock Visitation” in honor of the sisters of the Monastery of the Visitation in Minneapolis.  These sisters set out a windsock on days when their much-loved after-school program is open to neighborhood kids.   They are Elizabeth…

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December 8 | Advent 2 | When Angels Visit

Text: Luke 1:26-38Speaker: Joel Miller

As far as I know, I’ve been within close range of a bald eagle in flight exactly twice in my life.  I remember each pretty well because they both happened within the last two months.  The first was in October.  Our family was at my brother Luke’s cabin.  It sits on top of a wooded sand dune, overlooking Lake Michigan.  It was morning, and we were out on the deck with some warm drinks, facing the lake, when we spotted a large bird over the water flying toward us.  Someone called out that it was an eagle.  As soon as I saw it I expected it to veer off any moment, keeping its distance.  But it kept flying toward us, and thus kept getting bigger…and it kept flying directly toward us.  Definitely a bald eagle.  It was getting close enough that my brain had just started to wonder if we might need to be the ones to veer off in one direction or the other.  And then right at that split second where fascination was about to give way to fear, maybe about 50 feet away, it swerved up and to our right – white head, dark outstretched wings, and white tail feathers in full view – perching in a nearby tree top.  Luke was aware of a nest near the cabin, but hadn’t had an encounter quite like that.  Neither had we.    

The second eagle came a week ago, last Sunday afternoon.  It was my birthday, which meant I had the rare upper hand in requesting a family activity that everyone pretty much had to agree to before we got our Christmas tree.  So the four of us went for an extended walk behind Antrim Lake on the dirt trails that go along the Olentangy…

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December 1 | Advent 1 | Preparing to be Amazed

Text: Luke 1:5-25Speaker: Mark Rupp

Welcome to the season of Advent. This Sunday marks the beginning, or more aptly, the return to the beginning of a cycle that moves through expectation, arrival, growth and learning, loss and gain, death and resurrection, and the new life we find all along the way. The name Advent comes from the Latin, adventus meaning arrival. It is a season of anticipation and waiting, of watching and preparing. 

And this year we have chosen the theme “Visitations” as a container for these four Sundays leading up to Christmas day. Throughout these weeks, we will be hearing stories of different visitations from Luke’s gospel. Meetings between human and divine, encounters between people both familiar and strange, songs and visions of how we are called to greet the world around us. Advent prepares us for Christmas, a day we celebrate God visiting us in a new way through the baby Jesus, but the many other encounters we have along the way are also opportunities for Divine visitations. In the office this week, we were discussing the theme and someone shared that for them “visitations” brought to mind the practice of offering condolences before a funeral or memorial service. And for someone else, they said “visitations” brought to mind the idea of otherworldly, perhaps strange, visions. 

Visitations come in all shapes and sizes: welcome and unwelcome, comforting and discomforting, surprising and mundane, reorienting and disruptive; some brimming with hope and joy while others filled with sorrow and pain. In all of these, the enduring question for us is where and how we find the presence of God, even in those encounters that feel removed from the sacred, when God feels hidden or when the blessings of the dark have yet to reveal themselves. 

So what comes to mind when you hear the…

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