By Ragan Sutterfield

• Given Lives in a Given World by Ragan Sutterfield (2/14/2017)
  Seventh Sunday After the Epiphany Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18 Matthew 5:38-48 In his essay, “Two Economies,” writer and farmer Wendell Berry recounts an exchange with his friend Wes Jackson.  The two were struggling to come up with an economy that would more appropriately value what is valuable since the money economy was clearly failing on that account.  Berry suggested that perhaps an economy based on energy rather than money would be more comprehensive, but Jackson rejected that measure as still too small.  Frustrated, Berry asked Jackson what economy would be large enough.  Jackson replied, “the Kingdom of God.” As we...
• Prayer in the Zone by Ragan Sutterfield (10/12/2016)
  Proper 24, Year C Jeremiah 31:27-34 Psalm 119:97-104 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5 Luke 18:1-8 In Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker there is a room in the middle of a mysterious place called the “Zone.” It is a place where life on earth was interupted by an alien force and it has become dangerous to anyone who moves through it without care--the landscape always shifting, the wreckage of civilization overgrown by the wild. Stalkers are the people...
• What Are You Preparing For? by Ragan Sutterfield (8/3/2016)
    Proper 14 (C) Isaiah 1:1, 10-20 Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24 Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16 Luke 12:32-40 If you’re planning on buying a winter place in Miami Beach, I wouldn’t advise it. It’s an island and the only thing on the rise there is the sea level. As Elizabeth Kolbert chronicled last fall in the New Yorker, when a super tide comes crashing in it...
• What We Owe by Ragan Sutterfield (6/9/2016)
  Luke 7:36-8:3 (Proper 6:Year C) At one time I taught at a Christian high school where most kids were relatively well off and for the years I taught there I always worked in a discussion on privilege. The students would assure me that they were not privileged and that their parents weren’t either. “My dad built his business from scratch,” they’d say, or “my parents have worked hard for everything they’ve got.” The lines, rehearsed and repeated, were the same every time. I’d lead them through a series of exercises and thought experiments that would help most, in the end, see their advantages—the head start, however har...
• Danger: Holy Ground by Ragan Sutterfield (2/25/2016)
  Third Sunday in Lent, Year C Exodus 3:1-15 Psalm 63:1-8 1 Corinthians 10:1-13 Luke 13:1-9 I have two daughters; one is four, the other one. I am not a particularly anxious father, but it doesn’t take much to recognize the fragility of life, the many dangers that threaten it. There are cars, there are electrical sockets, there are long flights of stairs; there are hard things and sharp corners, there are choking hazards everywhere. The world is full of dangers and ...
• Tilling and Keeping: A Report on Gathering 2014 by Ragan Sutterfield (8/18/2014)
  In July we gathered to explore our call to “till and keep” the very good creation of God. Over 140 participants gathered in Chicago, traveling from California to New York.  There were a record number of first timers at the gathering this year—new friends that we hope will continue to join us. [image] Our three plenary speakers guided our conversations at the gathering.  First was Norman Wirzba, who renewed our understanding of the very good creation and called us away from the language of “nature” that obscure...
• Hating the Godfather by Ragan Sutterfield (6/19/2014)
  Proper 7, Year A Matthew 10:24-39 The Godfather, the classic 1972 film by Francis Ford Coppola, opens with a garden wedding at the family estate.  It is a homecoming for Michael Corleone, the favorite son who’s just returned from a tour in World War II and is enrolled at Dartmouth.  The picture is clear early on—Michael loves his family, but he doesn’t want to be a part of it.  The Corleones are a crime organization and they are as tight knit as they are patriarchal.  They have a culture all their own, an import of Sicilian semi-feudalism where powerful families are essentially rulers of small fiefdoms—thus the idea of the godfather. Michael wants to live a more Americanized life with a...
• The Walking Dead and Waking Saints by Ragan Sutterfield (4/10/2014)
  Passion Sunday Matthew 27:11-54 The nice thing about having to preach or write about the scriptures is that some time or other you run across a piece of a familiar passage that is utterly strange.  This happened when I read one of the options for the Gospel this Passion Sunday, Matthew 27:11-54. It starts out familiarly enough: Jesus goes before Pontius Pilate, is condemned and then crucified.  When Jesus died we all know that the earth shook and the curtain of the temple was torn in two.  What I barely remembered though was this verse: “The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and en...
• Groaning and Flourishing: Gathered by Our Creator's Care by Ragan Sutterfield (2/5/2014)
  Over Christmas I went bird watching near my parents house in Arkansas. Driving to a Wildlife Management Area I passed Lake Conway where nearly 7,000 barrels of oil spilled from an ExxonMobil tar-sands pipeline. The site in the lake nearest the spill still had containment buoys eight months after the accident. There was a man in a air boat and hazmat suit testing the water with hundreds of ducks and gulls and cormorants were feeding in the water nearby. Since then there have been other spills. Most recently West Virginia's waters were poisoned by the ironically named, "Freedom Industries." The damage done is beyond calculation and it will take years to know the full effects. These examples are just to name some of the ways in which creation is groaning in pain and eager longing for God's Ki...
• The Risks of Baby Dedication by Ragan Sutterfield (1/29/2014)
  Luke 2:22-40 Imagine this at your baby’s dedication.  You go up front where the preacher does her blessing; perhaps water is sprinkled or maybe even your baby is baptized in a little font.  Pious prayers are said, God invoked—it’s a routine that happens month by month in the cycle of the church’s life.  Then a man walks in, “led by the Spirit,” and promises that your child is destined “for the rising and falling of many” and that he will be “opposed so vigorously that it will reveal the intentions of many.”  Then this man says that you will find your own soul “pierced by a sword.”  A little blue or pink New Testament would hardly seem an appropriate gift after all of that. Jesus was certainly no ...
• What Are You Waiting For? by Ragan Sutterfield (12/11/2013)
  Isaiah 35:1-10 Matthew 11:2-11 I keep being told these days to wait.  In sermons, blog posts, earnest Advent Facebook updates, the message has been, more often than not, “wait.”  Waiting is good.  Waiting trains us in patience, one of the most important virtues we can cultivate.  Advent, however, isn’t the time for it.  As our gospel for this Sunday reminds us—the wait is over, the kingdom has come. The passage opens with John in prison, a place made for the worst kind of waiting.  He wants to know from Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”  This is critical for John because he is ab...
• Recreating Eaarth by Ragan Sutterfield (10/16/2013)
  Proper 24: Year C Jeremiah 31:27-34 “There is...no inconsistency between creation and salvation”--so says St. Athanasius, the 4th Century Bishop of Alexandria.  Athanasius was trying to articulate how it was that God could become incarnate in human flesh--a mind boggling reality as much in our day as it was in his.  For him, the turning of the human will against God had not only resulted in a loss of communion, but also a kind of de-creation.  As Athanasius put it, “Man who was created in God’s image...was disappearing, and the work of God was being undone.” Christ, being God’s Word present and active in creation from the beginning, had to come in human form so that he could re-create the world a...
• The Church in the Wild by Ragan Sutterfield (8/15/2013)

  Isaiah 5:1-7

  Several years ago I heard an interview with Alan Weisman about his book The World Without Us.  The book’s title is fairly explanatory of its subject--it is a book about the world after humankind--how long it would take for the asphalt and concrete to crack; how well all those animals we’ve bred to live with us would fare after we are gone.  It was fascinating to hear Weisman describe the changes that would come to a place like Manhattan--how the weeds, and successional trees, and cats would take over (dogs it turns out have tied their fate to ours).

  I like to entertain such ideas--of a city overgrown with weeds, of the industrial c...

• Stay Close by Ragan Sutterfield (6/26/2013)
  Proper 8 Luke 9:51-62 Jesus walks, moves, doesn't stick around. He doesn't wait until you've figured out your plans, vested your 401(K), said your goodbyes and wrapped up loose ends. To be a disciple, to follow Jesus, is to go when the teacher goes, follow where the teacher leads. The student is not to say, "where next," but repeat to herself, "stay close." That's what I read in this gospel passage where Jesus tells us "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." "Stay close" disrupts our stable world of fixed religion, it requires us to stick less to this or that place whether it is a physical place or a p...
• Loving Those People by Ragan Sutterfield (4/25/2013)

  Easter 5, Year C

  John 13:31-35

  She stood outside of the meeting room, a cigarette in hand--crying.  This was a weekend spiritual retreat, a time of renewal, but for this woman it was clearly painful, even degrading.  My wife approached the woman and asked what was wrong.  “I’m Baptist,” she said, “and everyone is just saying such bad things about us.”  The retreat was put on by the Episcopal Church and this being a southern Episcopal gathering “Baptist bashing” is bound to be the common sport.  The Baptist are the dominant denomination in the region, often conservative brands.  Many in the Episcopal Church grew up in Baptist churches or similar denomination...

• Uncover Your Face by Ragan Sutterfield (2/7/2013)
  Last Epiphany, Year C Exodus 34:29-35 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a] One of my favorite passages in contemporary literature comes toward the end of Rick Moody’s The Black Veil.  The book is a memoir that explores a family myth that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s parable “The Minister’s Black Veil” was inspired by one of Moody’s ancestors, a guilt ridden puritan minister.  To understand the power of the black veil Moody wears one, and then riffs for pages on the power of the veil and its co...
• Preparing for Disaster by Ragan Sutterfield (11/28/2012)
  First Sunday of Advent, Year C (RCL) 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13 Luke 21:25-36 We’ve become all too familiar with disasters and the whole genre of reporting them (is there a disaster TV cable channel yet?).  The reporter, looking like some alien that dropped from the sky, surrounded by a landscape of devastation. There are the stories about hope, the stories about good neighbors, the stories about this or that agency not doing enough, and then there seems to always be the guy who didn’t see it coming.  The “I was just going to wait it out” kind of guy.  You have to wonder about those people—every siren is going off, the new c...
• A Hard, Simple Truth by Ragan Sutterfield (9/19/2012)
  James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a Mark 9:30-37 For the past few weeks my wife, 9 month old daughter, and I have been on the road.  Somehow or other it worked out that September was a month where we had several out of town engagements and we decided that rather than travel back and forth we’d make one month long trip of it, visiting friends along the way, and making a quick beach trip in between engagements.  Traveling is one of those tricky things that depends on your perspective.  On the one hand it can be an incredible experience of seeing new places, embracing the beauty of creation, and catching up with old friends.  On the other it can be a painful disruption of sacred routines, full of st...
• The Banquets of Two Kingdoms by Ragan Sutterfield (7/11/2012)
  Proper 10 (B) Mark 6:14-29 Psalm 85:8-13 This is what repentance is about.  It is a call to renewal—turning from the fallen, petty kingdoms East of Eden to the love, peace, and abundance of the Kingdom of God.  This is a reality that we can begin to live into now, but to do so we must switch our allegiances and become members of another kingdom—the Kingdom of Life against the Empire of Death. Just before our gospel reading this Sunday (RCL) we witness Jesus sending his disciples out to proclaim this Kingdom of Life, completely without any supplies or tools of coercion.  The ...
• Believe It or Not by Ragan Sutterfield (5/3/2012)
  Acts 8:26-40 1 John 4:7-21 John 15:1-8 Monday evening as I was sitting down to read the lectionary for this Fifth Sunday in Easter, NPR carried a story that has haunted me since.  It was the testimony of a Methodist pastor, Teresa MacBain who found that she could no longer believe in God.  Her reasons were classic—the problem of evil, etc.  For a time she continued in her role as a minister—albeit a faithless one.  The cognitive dissonance eventually led her to “come out” as an atheist at convention of non-believers.  The video...
• Plastic Minds and Magic Eyes by Ragan Sutterfield (2/14/2012)
  Last Sunday After Epiphany (Year B) RCL 2 Kings 2:1-12 2 Corinthians 4:3-6 Mark 9:2-9 Not long ago my nephew was forcing me to find Waldo in page after page of busy scenes where somewhere there was a goofy guy in red and white stripes.  “Where’s Waldo”, “Magic Eye”--we love seeing games where we must pick out an image from visual confusion.  Perhaps this love comes from our history as hunters and gathers, w...
• The Church as Highway Department by Ragan Sutterfield (12/6/2011)
  Third Sunday of Advent (Year B) Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 Luke 1:46-55 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 John 1:6-8, 19-28 Not long ago I heard a program on NPR about the use of satellite images by human rights groups as a way of tracking atrocities in South Sudan.  Using before and after images human rights workers are able to track changes in the landscape that might indicate a mass grave or the razing of a village.  The satellite images also offer a chance, in some cases, of heading off attacks because prece...
• Let Others Decide by Ragan Sutterfield (9/28/2011)
  16th Sunday after Pentecost Isaiah 5:1-7 Philippians 3:4b-14 Matthew 21:33-46 I call myself a gardener. I've even written how-to articles on growing things. But anyone who took a look at the burned-over mess in my front yard this year would have their doubts. Whatever my thoughts about myself, whatever a byline might state, this summer I failed to live up to that title. I failed, in my distractions and the particular demands of this drought season, to carry out the disciplines necessary to be a gardener. I was glad to claim the title “gardener” and not suffer the heat, time and sweat that would really make...
• Life Among the Weeds by Ragan Sutterfield (7/13/2011)
  Pentecost +5:  Romans 8:12-25 and Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 We live among the weeds—they crowd around us, their roots intertwine with ours, and sometimes the suffocate us.  Surely the harvest will be less bountiful when we allow the weeds to grow among the wheat—we can imagine the full vibrant growth of their grain as they have the full resources of the soil.  Couldn’t we just have some genetically modified wheat, some holy Round-Up to kill the weeds? Perhaps, but Jesus’ hearers would have understood something important about the wheat that came out of a field of weeds—it was strong and sure, tested by the weeds and able to grow in spite of them.  The seeds of that wheat will carry t...
• Why Do You Weep? by Ragan Sutterfield (4/22/2011)
  Jeremiah 31:1-6; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-18 “Why do you weep?”  That seems to be the central question of the Gospel reading this Easter Sunday.   It is the question the angels ask of Mary when she looks into the tomb; it is the question the resurrected Christ asks when he finds Mary in the garden and she mistakes him for the gardener. When the other disciples, Peter and John, came to see that the tomb was empty, they left—satisfied with the reality they thought they understood—Jesus was gone, his body taken, one more event in a series of tragedies that had seen their hopes for a new reality gone.   But Mary remained with the question—she stayed with the empty tomb, the trace of the Lord she still loved, the death she didn’t claim to understand.  It is by sta...
• Reality Hunger by Ragan Sutterfield (2/10/2011)
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  Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Psalm 119:1-8; Matthew 5:21-37 Reality hunger.  I read a book by that title last summer and the title, more than the book, describes what many of us are feeling these days.  We long for the concrete, the real, the hard surfac...
• God Made Visible by Ragan Sutterfield (12/31/2010)
  John 1:1-18; Matthew 2:1-12 What makes God visible?  That was the question that struck me reading the lectionary passages for this week. This is one of those rare weeks in which the Episcopal Church (my tradition) varies its readings from the standard Revised Common Lectionary, so I read both the gospel readings from John 1 and Matthew 2:1-12 (Episcopal).  Reading both was instructive because both are about God being made visible. In John 1:18 we read, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.”  This comes after we are told of the light coming into the world, a light that makes God visible by dwelling with us a...
• Proper 21: Not Enough For Everyone’s Greed by Ragan Sutterfield (9/23/2010)
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  Amos 6:1, 4-7; Ps 146; 1 Tim 6:11-16; Lk 16:19-31 When I read passages like those in this week’s lectionary I find myself saying, not unlik...
• Ask And It Will Be Given by Ragan Sutterfield (7/22/2010)
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  Genesis 18: 20-32; Psalm 138; Colossians 2:6-15; Luke 11:1-13 I heard a lecture by the philosopher Dallas Willard once in which he said that he believes that God wants to fulfill all of o...
• Trinity Sunday by Ragan Sutterfield (5/28/2010)
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  Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15 I must admit, I am not very comfortable with spirits. God the Father, God the Son—these are concrete realities that...
• Insurrection Sunday by Ragan Sutterfield (3/26/2010)
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  Luke 19:28-40; Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 31:9-16; Luke 22:14-23:56 “For I hear the whispering of many— terror all around!— as they scheme together against me, as they...
• The Joy of Not Being in Charge by Ragan Sutterfield (1/12/2010)
    Isaiah 62:1-5; Psalm 36:5-10; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11 Norman Wirzba, in his book Living the Sabbath, follows the medieval rabbi Rashi in saying that the divine work was not completed in six days, but in seven, and that what remained to be created on the seventh day was menuha: “the rest, tranquility, serenity, and peace of God.” Wirzba writes that God’s rest “when understood within a menuha context, is not simply a cessation from activity but rather the lifting up and celebration...
• Spring Will Come Before We Know It by Ragan Sutterfield (11/25/2009)
  [image] I have been shopping for trees lately—apples, figs, maybe a few persimmons. It will be couple of years before the trees bare fruit and now, as we move into December the trees are dormant, reserving their sugars to live out a time when the sun won’t be around enough to power their life. The trees are moving to their reserve supplies; they are waiting until the spring. ...
• Coming Home with Shouts of Joy by Ragan Sutterfield (10/22/2009)
  [image] Jeremiah 31:7-9; Psalm 126; Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 10:46-52 “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:51). It’s a striking question Jesus ...
• Preparing for the Gift by Ragan Sutterfield (8/26/2009)
  [image]Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9; Psalm 15; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8,