SERMON SPOTLIGHT: Sunday July 12, 2026 Proper 10A
The Rev. Aron Kramer, Rector
St Edward's Episcopal Church
Sunday, July 12, 2026
St Edward's Episcopal Church
Sunday, July 12, 2026
Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67
Psalm 45: 11-18
Romans 7:15-25a
Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30
Going through old sermons, I found one I preached years ago that ended with a plea. I asked that we let the Word of God break out of the box we had contained it in. I said the call to sow, the same call we hear about in today's Gospel, is not for us, not for this congregation, this gathered people, it is for everyone else in the world, those we love and those we do not, those we know and those we do not. I said: sow your seed. Let it all go.
That was twenty or so years ago. And I have learned something in the years since that I did not know when I preached those words. I have learned that the box we tend to put God into serves excellent snacks and mediocre coffee.
You all here at St. Ed’s are the most hospitable people I have ever served with. I want you to hear that, because I mean it, and because I am not going to take it back. In four years I have watched you feed each other, welcome each other in love and tenderness, care for each other, celebrate each other. I have watched the tables in the parish hall fill up Sunday after Sunday with tea and cheese and cookies and cake, a full-on feast, week after week, offered freely, for the most part, and always offered with love. That is a gift, and it is real, and it comes from who you are.
And that is exactly why it is so hard to share this with you this morning. I wonder if we have built a fence around our hospitality.
Hear the parable again. A sower went out to sow. Went out. Seed flung on the path, seed flung on the rocks, seed flung into the thorns, seed flung over the fence and onto the road and into the neighbor's field. This sower has no respect for property lines. This sower is wasteful, reckless, extravagant, almost embarrassing to watch. Any farmer in Jesus' audience would have winced. You don't throw good seeds at a footpath. You don't seed the gravel. And yet the sower does because the sower is not managing scarcity. The sower is God, and God does not know how to sow carefully.
Everything about this parable moves outward. The seed flies away from the sower's hand, out past the tended ground, out into places nobody would have chosen. The motion of the Kingdom is always about scattering.
Think about it. The seed comes in the door, and we collect it. We gather in worship, and then we gather in the hall, and the food is abundant and the coffee is good and the company is warm and it all flows toward the center, toward us, toward the people who already came. We are gatherers. We have become magnificent gatherers. But the sower in this parable is not a gatherer. The sower is a scatterer, and no seed has ever germinated on the parish hall floor, no matter how good the snacks are.
For four years I have stood in this pulpit and preached to you that hospitality must be the core of who we are. Hospitality was what our open table was about, and I meant every word. But I think I may have preached you into a corner. One of my proudest moments was when I realized it was an hour after Church and many of you were still sitting around tables speaking and sharing stories with one another. I tell everyone about how when I arrived, the coffee hour was about 15 minutes long and then the church became a ghost town. Now, I have to chase people out of here up to 90 minutes after church has ended. I tell that story all the time. We discovered something important in our souls, in our bodies and in our connections with one another.
But I wonder if we have forgotten that hospitality that ends at the table is not hospitality yet. It is hosting. Hosting is good. But hospitality, the kind God practices is what happens when the table makes you reckless.
In today’s Epistle Paul writes to the Romans about two ways of being: life according to the flesh, and life according to the Spirit. And for generations we have heard "flesh" and thought Paul meant the body, appetite, scandal. He doesn't, when Paul says flesh, he means life organized around what we can manage, preserve, and keep. The mind set on the flesh is the mind set on self-preservation. It is the instinct that hoards, that curates, that controls, that keeps everything within reach because our reach is shrinking. And Paul says the mind of the flesh is death, not as a punishment, but as a trajectory. A life curved entirely inward is already practicing for the grave, no matter how generous the spread on the table.
That is an uncomfortable word, so let me say it plainly: flesh can look wholesome. Flesh can look like a beautifully organized coffee hour. Flesh can look like a church that loves itself deeply and has quietly stopped expecting anyone new to sit down. But Paul continues, the same passage carries the two most liberating claims in all of Scripture.
The first is the very first verse: There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Condemnation belongs to the old economy, the flesh economy, the economy of earning and sorting and deserving and Paul says that economy is over.
And the second claim is this: Paul says the Spirit of God dwells in you. The word he uses is a household word it means to make a home, to take up residence. Before St. Ed’s set a table, God set one, and the venue was you, each of you gathered here today. The Spirit of God looked at you, before the earth was made and the waters moved, God looked at you and moved in without checking the name on the chair. You are not the hosts of God's hospitality, you are where God’s hospitality lives.
So what do we do with all this? First, here is what we do not do. We do not cancel the coffee hour. We do not shame the ice cream. The table is not the problem, the table is a greenhouse of sorts. And greenhouses are good; seedlings need them. But nobody has ever fed a neighborhood from a greenhouse. At some point what has been growing in the warmth has to go into the ground, and the ground, friends, is out there, past the doors, past the parking lot, past our property line.
I want to leave you with a question, not a devotional question, a real one, with a date on it. Sit with it over the ice cream, talk about this week with your friends. Carry it through the summer. I want us wrestling with it together by the time this room fills up again in September:
What does the hospitality of St. Edward's look like on a Tuesday, off this property, for someone who will never get to experience it on a Sunday?
The seed is in your hand, the sower is already in the field. The Spirit of the living God has made a home in your body and is, even now, feeling around for the door, ready to get out and be shared with all. Amen.
That was twenty or so years ago. And I have learned something in the years since that I did not know when I preached those words. I have learned that the box we tend to put God into serves excellent snacks and mediocre coffee.
You all here at St. Ed’s are the most hospitable people I have ever served with. I want you to hear that, because I mean it, and because I am not going to take it back. In four years I have watched you feed each other, welcome each other in love and tenderness, care for each other, celebrate each other. I have watched the tables in the parish hall fill up Sunday after Sunday with tea and cheese and cookies and cake, a full-on feast, week after week, offered freely, for the most part, and always offered with love. That is a gift, and it is real, and it comes from who you are.
And that is exactly why it is so hard to share this with you this morning. I wonder if we have built a fence around our hospitality.
Hear the parable again. A sower went out to sow. Went out. Seed flung on the path, seed flung on the rocks, seed flung into the thorns, seed flung over the fence and onto the road and into the neighbor's field. This sower has no respect for property lines. This sower is wasteful, reckless, extravagant, almost embarrassing to watch. Any farmer in Jesus' audience would have winced. You don't throw good seeds at a footpath. You don't seed the gravel. And yet the sower does because the sower is not managing scarcity. The sower is God, and God does not know how to sow carefully.
Everything about this parable moves outward. The seed flies away from the sower's hand, out past the tended ground, out into places nobody would have chosen. The motion of the Kingdom is always about scattering.
Think about it. The seed comes in the door, and we collect it. We gather in worship, and then we gather in the hall, and the food is abundant and the coffee is good and the company is warm and it all flows toward the center, toward us, toward the people who already came. We are gatherers. We have become magnificent gatherers. But the sower in this parable is not a gatherer. The sower is a scatterer, and no seed has ever germinated on the parish hall floor, no matter how good the snacks are.
For four years I have stood in this pulpit and preached to you that hospitality must be the core of who we are. Hospitality was what our open table was about, and I meant every word. But I think I may have preached you into a corner. One of my proudest moments was when I realized it was an hour after Church and many of you were still sitting around tables speaking and sharing stories with one another. I tell everyone about how when I arrived, the coffee hour was about 15 minutes long and then the church became a ghost town. Now, I have to chase people out of here up to 90 minutes after church has ended. I tell that story all the time. We discovered something important in our souls, in our bodies and in our connections with one another.
But I wonder if we have forgotten that hospitality that ends at the table is not hospitality yet. It is hosting. Hosting is good. But hospitality, the kind God practices is what happens when the table makes you reckless.
In today’s Epistle Paul writes to the Romans about two ways of being: life according to the flesh, and life according to the Spirit. And for generations we have heard "flesh" and thought Paul meant the body, appetite, scandal. He doesn't, when Paul says flesh, he means life organized around what we can manage, preserve, and keep. The mind set on the flesh is the mind set on self-preservation. It is the instinct that hoards, that curates, that controls, that keeps everything within reach because our reach is shrinking. And Paul says the mind of the flesh is death, not as a punishment, but as a trajectory. A life curved entirely inward is already practicing for the grave, no matter how generous the spread on the table.
That is an uncomfortable word, so let me say it plainly: flesh can look wholesome. Flesh can look like a beautifully organized coffee hour. Flesh can look like a church that loves itself deeply and has quietly stopped expecting anyone new to sit down. But Paul continues, the same passage carries the two most liberating claims in all of Scripture.
The first is the very first verse: There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Condemnation belongs to the old economy, the flesh economy, the economy of earning and sorting and deserving and Paul says that economy is over.
And the second claim is this: Paul says the Spirit of God dwells in you. The word he uses is a household word it means to make a home, to take up residence. Before St. Ed’s set a table, God set one, and the venue was you, each of you gathered here today. The Spirit of God looked at you, before the earth was made and the waters moved, God looked at you and moved in without checking the name on the chair. You are not the hosts of God's hospitality, you are where God’s hospitality lives.
So what do we do with all this? First, here is what we do not do. We do not cancel the coffee hour. We do not shame the ice cream. The table is not the problem, the table is a greenhouse of sorts. And greenhouses are good; seedlings need them. But nobody has ever fed a neighborhood from a greenhouse. At some point what has been growing in the warmth has to go into the ground, and the ground, friends, is out there, past the doors, past the parking lot, past our property line.
I want to leave you with a question, not a devotional question, a real one, with a date on it. Sit with it over the ice cream, talk about this week with your friends. Carry it through the summer. I want us wrestling with it together by the time this room fills up again in September:
What does the hospitality of St. Edward's look like on a Tuesday, off this property, for someone who will never get to experience it on a Sunday?
The seed is in your hand, the sower is already in the field. The Spirit of the living God has made a home in your body and is, even now, feeling around for the door, ready to get out and be shared with all. Amen.
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