This was a sermon for a Community Thanksgiving Service delivered at Old Bergen Church in Jersey City, New Jersey, November 2022.

You got a fast car

I want a ticket to anywhere

Maybe we make a deal

Maybe together we can get somewhere

Any place is better

Starting from zero, got nothing to lose

Maybe we'll make something

Me, myself, I got nothing to prove

“Let us now praise famous ones…their offspring will continue forever, and their glory will never be blotted out. Their bodies are buried in peace, but their name lies on generation after generation.”

“After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman. Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see. And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure that someone was there squinting through the dust, saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only to be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then, even for a few nights, into that other life where you and that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy?” Tracy K. Smith, from Do You Wonder Sometimes

“The judgement of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity…” MLK

“Therefore my beloved…work out your own salvation in fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you…” Saint Paul

A time for prayer today at 3pm

We do not need more, bigger, stronger, fiercer beliefs.

We need humility. Grace. Love. Reconciliation.

Seeing Good Friday as a day of reconciliation invites us into the Kingdom of Heaven—a beautiful neighborhood—that has less to do with the suffering of Jesus and everything to do with the Grace of God that helps us become more human.

A lot can happen in a week