The Rev. Phil Brochard

The sermon connects a story from All Souls about recognizing a formerly homeless man who had transformed his life with the Gospel story of the man born blind in John 9. After gaining sight, the healed man is no longer recognized by his neighbors because they had always defined him by his blindness. The passage highlights a deeper theme of spiritual perception: while the healed man gradually perceives who Jesus is, those around him refuse to see the truth.

Using the concept of “difficult knowledge,” the sermon explores how people often resist truths that challenge established beliefs or systems. Such resistance can appear as rejection, certainty from those in power, scapegoating, or avoidance. The healed man models a different response—listening, curiosity, and openness to transformation.

When the man is expelled from the synagogue for acknowledging Jesus, Christ seeks him out and finds him. The sermon concludes that difficult truths may lead to conflict or exclusion, but they ultimately set people free, and Christ accompanies those who are cast out for seeing what others cannot.

The Rev. Rachel Dykzeul

The sermon reflects on a world divided by conflict and identity politics, using the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman as a model for crossing human boundaries. The historical hostility between Jews and Samaritans illustrates how deeply communities can exclude one another.

Drawing on Miroslav Volf’s theology of “exclusion and embrace,” the sermon describes reconciliation as an embodied process: opening oneself in vulnerability, waiting for response, embracing the other, and then allowing both people to remain transformed yet distinct.

Jesus models this radical openness by crossing into Samaria and initiating connection with someone his society rejected. His actions reveal that he is not a regional Messiah but the sustaining light for the entire world.

The sermon concludes by inviting listeners, especially during Lent, to resist tribal divisions and instead practice the courageous act of embracing those whom society labels as “other.”

The Rev. Phil Brochard

The preacher begins with the joyful discovery of a marble run sculpture at the Albany Bulb, where freeing a clogged channel of marbles led to a sudden cascade of movement and sound. This becomes a metaphor for spiritual awakening.

The sermon then explores why Nicodemus, a religious leader, comes to Jesus by night. His confusion about being “born again” reflects the limits of linear logic. Jesus’ teaching points instead to being born anew—open to ongoing revelation. The story of Thomas Aquinas, who stopped writing after a profound encounter with God, underscores that theology, though important, is not the same as divine experience.

Nicodemus’ later appearances—culminating in his public act of burying Jesus—show quiet transformation. Like the freed marbles, something in him is released. The sermon invites believers to remain open, to risk new paths, and to allow God’s Spirit to move them into new perception and courage.

The Rev. Emily Boring

Using the image of hovering over a deep ocean drop-off, the sermon explores human longing as a boundary between the finite and the infinite. Reframing Adam and Eve and Jesus in the wilderness as two responses to hunger, the preacher suggests that longing itself is not sin. Adam and Eve grasp to eliminate their limits, leading to alienation. Jesus inhabits his hunger with trust and dependence on God. Lent becomes a season to examine our own longings—not to suppress them, but to let them draw us into deeper relationship with the infinite source who alone can hold them.

The Rev. Phil Brochard

Reflecting on writing their aunt’s obituary, the preacher explores how obituaries reveal what a person truly treasured in life. This becomes a lens for understanding Lent as a yearly reminder of mortality and a chance to reorient our hearts. Drawing on Jesus’ teaching about almsgiving, prayer, fasting, and treasure in Matthew’s Gospel, the sermon invites listeners to pay attention to where they direct their hearts and energy. By facing death honestly, we learn how to live intentionally—storing up what truly matters rather than what rusts and fades.

The Rev. Michael Lemaire

The sermon reflects on the Transfiguration as both a climactic epiphany and a hinge moment leading toward the cross. While the event reveals Jesus’ divine identity, the deeper transformation occurs in the disciples, whose understanding of God is challenged and expanded. The preacher argues that “believing is seeing”—our prior assumptions shape what we perceive, especially in the spiritual life. Our limited images of God can confine our experience of God. Drawing on Anthony de Mello, cosmic imagery, and the open-handed posture of early Christian prayer, the sermon invites listeners to hold their understanding of God lightly and remain open to being changed. The final question lingers: if Jesus invites you up the mountain, will you go?

The Rev. Dr. Bill McNabb

Returning to the pulpit after five years, the preacher reflects on finding a spiritual home at All Souls and celebrates a faith marked by joy, inclusivity, and life. Drawing on Jesus’ images of salt and light, he calls Christians to enhance the world with delight rather than gloom and to shine visibly against fear and oppression. Through stories from history, personal memory, and scripture, the sermon affirms that love, joy, and small acts of light can become hinge moments that change the world.

The Rev. Phil Brochard

This sermon links Jesus’s Beatitudes and Micah’s call to justice, showing that faith is not about achieving moral perfection or offering extravagant sacrifice, but about paying attention to where God already is. God’s blessing rests with the vulnerable, the grieving, and the oppressed. True faithfulness means acting with justice, kindness, and humility in places of suffering—embodied in acts of courage and compassion amid real human cruelty.

The Rev. Phil Brochard

Jesus begins his ministry not in peace but in response to political repression, moving away from power and proclaiming an anti-imperial vision of God’s reign. The kingdom of heaven is not about the afterlife but God’s justice breaking into the present, calling people to repentance, understood as transformation and new vision. Discipleship is risky, communal, and urgent, especially in a world marked by violence and cruelty. The sermon invites listeners to see where healing and justice are already happening—and to follow Jesus together into that kingdom.

The Rev. Emily Boring

The sermon proclaims that in a time marked by fear, cruelty, and division, the Christian calling is to witness to a deeper truth: love overcomes separation. Drawing on stories of communal resistance in Minnesota, the theology of John’s Gospel, and the season of Epiphany, the preacher names sin not as individual failure but as the illusion of separation. Jesus reveals that illusion and invites people into abiding relationship through love. Where separation feels strongest, love’s power is greatest—and the church is called to choose that love through movement, encounter, and courageous kinship.

The Rev. Phil Brochard, Pastor Anthony Hughes, & Rabbi Rebekah Stern

In a shared interfaith sermon, three clergy reflect on Isaiah 42 as a call to collective, gentle justice rooted in vulnerability rather than domination. Reading the “servant” as a symbol of communal responsibility, they explore how true power emerges through care, shared suffering, and relational strength. Together, they affirm that justice is not inevitable through force, but possible through communities willing to protect the fragile, resist coercion, and imagine a different future.

The Rev. Phil Brochard

This sermon reflects on marriage, family, and faith through the lens of Mary’s example in Luke’s Gospel. Love, it argues, is not about perfection but about the capacity to hold joy, conflict, and mystery together. Drawing connections between Mary’s response to Jesus, long-term marriage, and Christian commitment, the preacher emphasizes that true freedom lies in choosing to give oneself fully. Grace is found not in flawless relationships, but in the willingness to stay, treasure the hard moments, and be “in it for all of it.”

The Rev. Dr. Mark Richardson

This sermon proclaims that Christmas reveals what is truly real: a world created from God’s longing to be present within it. Drawing from John’s Gospel, it affirms that God is found not above the material world but within it, shining light into real darkness without denying suffering. Through poetry, community stories, and personal testimony, the sermon calls listeners to recognize and embody small but powerful lights of hope, trusting that God’s creative love continues to work through fragile, human lives.

The Rev. Emily Boring

The Rev. Phil Brochard

The sermon reimagines the Christmas story to recover its urgency and humanity, moving from a crowded, astonished stable to a close focus on Mary’s contemplative presence. While others celebrate, Mary treasures and ponders the moment, holding together joy, fear, and trust. Her response becomes a model for faith in chaotic times: God meets us where we are, without requiring escape or certainty, and invites us to trust that Emmanuel is already with us.

The Rev. Emily Boring

The sermon reflects on a childhood fantasy of proving the virgin birth through science, using it to explore the deeper meaning of the incarnation. Rather than a mystery to be proven, the incarnation is revealed as God’s intimate entry into human life and suffering. In a world marked by violence and pain, Advent invites honest lament, the naming of darkness, and openness to a God who does not remove suffering but shares it. Christmas and the cross belong to one story: love meeting brokenness. This shared suffering is the true gift of Emmanuel, God with us.

The Rev. Rachel Dykzeul

John the Baptist’s question from prison—“Are you the one?”—reveals Advent as a season of uncertainty rather than clarity. Jesus does not arrive as expected, and John’s doubt mirrors our own questions about where God is amid suffering and injustice. Yet Jesus responds not with shame but with a reframing vision: the kingdom is already breaking in through healing, hospitality, and good news for the poor. Uncertainty, the sermon teaches, is not a failure of faith but a pathway to deeper revelation.

The Rev. Phil Brochard

The sermon uses Nomadland to illustrate how many people in America survive on society’s edge, making visible the injustice that keeps some secure while others live in precarity. This image leads to John the Baptist, a prophet living on the margins, whose harsh words to religious leaders expose both their complicity and their awareness that something is wrong. John calls them—and us—not to rely on privilege but to bear good fruit by confronting what is broken. Isaiah’s poetic vision of predators and prey living peacefully is presented as “impossible” imagery meant to expand our imaginations so we can see God’s realm breaking into the world. The preacher offers Elizabeth House as a real-world example where hope, community, and transformation reveal that such impossible peace is already emerging. We are called to see these signs, imagine the world God desires, repent, and live into it.

The Rev. Emily Boring

The sermon uses Mary Oliver’s poem about the world descending into winter “rich mash” to explore how loss, darkness, and stillness are not endings but the ground of renewal. While nature’s cycles teach this intuitively, trusting the same process within our inner lives—especially during Advent—can be frightening. Stillness can uncover unprocessed grief or desired changes we’ve avoided.

Though the Advent gospel speaks of upheaval and the unknown timing of Christ’s return, it reassures us in three ways: Christ meets us amid ordinary life; faith requires surrender rather than control; and in God, every ending becomes the seed of a beginning. Resurrection is a pattern that shapes all creation.

Advent invites us to enter our “inner winter” with trust—slowing down, keeping awake, and attending to hidden truths—supported by Scripture, liturgy, and poetry. The sermon ends with Oliver’s reminder that the vigor of what was is connected to the vitality of what will be.

The Rev. Phil Brochard

The sermon asks, “If Jesus is a king, what kind of king is he?” Using Luke’s crucifixion narrative, it shows that Jesus is a king who refuses to save himself even when mocked by religious leaders, Roman soldiers, and the criminal beside him. His kingship is revealed not through power or self-preservation but through self-giving love. In contrast to modern cultural tendencies toward self-interest, the sermon calls Christians to a citizenship defined by mercy, solidarity with the vulnerable, and allegiance to a king whose authority is expressed in sacrificial compassion.