All Recordings from The Episcopal Church of the Redeemer

Join us for worship this Sunday, October 13, for Holy Eucharist, Rite II with music. with The Rev. Herschel Wade, Celebrant and The Rev. Philip DeVaul, Preacher.

This worship service is also available live at 9:00 am on Sunday, and as a video following that at https://www.redeemer-cincy.org/online-worship/

When we wrote that line, about 7 years ago, I thought I knew what we meant by “every”. In my mind, I was thinking primarily about Republicans and Democrats, and a good mix of independents that included moderates, libertarian types, and some socialists for good measure. This was the scope of my thinking, and I thought that was pretty broad. That was everyone.

It feels naïve now. Sunny, even. It’s not that I didn’t realize other ideologies and perspectives existed – it’s that I assumed the rest to be so extreme as not to need to be acknowledged or discussed. But in the intervening years, Christian Nationalism has emerged as an apparently acceptable perspective. Many legislators openly and comfortably proclaim themselves as Christian Nationalists. Shockingly, frighteningly, it is not a disqualifying proclamation.

It should be.

Christian Nationalism is antithetical both to America and to Christianity.

Christian Nationalism insists on creating legislation based on one particular interpretation of religious belief. That is patently unamerican. Our country has in its founding documents a refusal to establish a state religion. You will sometimes hear adherents to Christian Nationalism try to sidestep this by talking about “Christian values” as the backbone of America’s creation. This is also patently false. For all its faults, our country’s desire to exist as a place free from religious coercion is imaginative, noble, and courageous.

America is not a Christian nation. We were not founded by Christians, but by a mixture of Christians, Deists, Atheists, Agnostics, and Unitarians. Our founding documents are not Christian. While some of the values they promote may be compatible with Christian thought, they are not themselves inherently Christian. Pretending otherwise is just that: Make-believe.

Join us for worship this Sunday, October 6, for Holy Eucharist, Rite II with music. with The Rev. Philip DeVaul, Celebrant and The Rev. Melanie Slane, Preacher.


This worship service is also available live at 9:00 am on Sunday, and as a video following that at https://www.redeemer-cincy.org/online-worship/

“So are there other Republicans at the church?” he asked me. And I laughed.

I laughed because it was a great question, asked directly, and without a hint of irony or cynicism. My breakfast companion was sitting across from me at a local diner when he asked this question. He is getting to know Church of the Redeemer, but he’s been an Episcopalian for his whole life – maybe longer. And as a Republican, he knows the drill. There are, for the record, plenty of Republicans at Redeemer, and in the Episcopal Church. 39% of Episcopalians, to be precise, identify as Republican. Not a small number. But compared to, say evangelical Christians, 56% of which identify as Republican, Episcopal culture simply feels a little more politically liberal. Plus, Cincinnati is a Democratic leaning city in a Republican leaning state. So that skews our congregation’s numbers a bit as well.

I laughed because, it was a lovely, vulnerable question. We live in such a heated and politically divided time. And I won’t even bemoan that. I think it makes sense that things are heated and divided. I don’t like it. But I think I get it. To many people – myself included – it feels as if the soul of our country is currently on the line, and how we navigate these next few years will be profoundly decisive. At the same time, we are getting more and more accustomed to living in self-selected bubbles based on common interest or affinity. So if he’s getting to know Redeemer, he wants to know if it’s a bubble. And that is a vulnerable question, because he’s sitting there over his eggs benedict asking, “Is there a place for me?” It takes courage to wonder that aloud, and it filled my heart with love.

I laughed, because, and I told him this immediately, not two minutes earlier, another Republican parishioner had just texted me to congratulate me on my 8^th anniversary of ministry at Redeemer. “See?” I joked, “Republicans!”

Join us for worship this Sunday, September 29, for Holy Eucharist, Rite II with music. with The Rev. Philip DeVaul, Celebrant and The Rev. Joyce Keeshin, Preacher.


This worship service is also available live at 9:00 am on Sunday, and as a video following that at https://www.redeemer-cincy.org/online-worship/

Last week I insisted that, as a Christian who is American, I must understand myself as Christian first – that my Christian identity supersedes my Americanness. There are, of course, problems with this assertion.

Join us for worship this Sunday, September 22, for Holy Eucharist, Rite II with music. with The Rev. Philip DeVaul, Celebrant and The Rev. Melanie Slane, Preacher.


This worship service is also available live at 9:00 am on Sunday, and as a video following that at https://www.redeemer-cincy.org/online-worship/

I remember putting that flag up and thinking, “I’m home.”

America was something about which I was religious. I wouldn’t have said that at the time. I would not have acknowledged that. But I could not only not fathom being anything other than American – I could not imagine that any other country could be as good as mine. To love my country was not just about affection or allegiance. To love America was to consciously believe that it was the greatest country on earth, that there had never been a country and never would be a country as powerful as smart, as resourceful, as successful, as free – as Good as the USA. To love my country meant to know what was wrong with other countries. To love my country was to feel sorry for people who weren’t American, who didn’t know what it was like to be so free, to be so successful, to save the world so many times.

The line between patriotism and nationalism is sometimes razor thin, isn’t it?

Join us for worship this Sunday, September 15, for Holy Eucharist, Rite II with music. with The Rev. Dr. Herschel Wade, Celebrant and The Rev. Philip DeVaul Preacher.


This worship service is also available live at 9:00 am on Sunday, and as a video following that at https://www.redeemer-cincy.org/online-worship/

Are you beset with gloom? Gloomy because someone like me refuses to accept your dehumanizing dream, crushing his nose for an answer? Oh well, still I rise. Maya audacious, defiant backtalk is a sassy refusal to accept the life restricting consequences of the denials, discrimination, and oppression by a dominant center and patriarchal system.



Today we hear of a similar sassy refusal to accept a denial of life in our Gospel reading. Here too, we hear backtalk to someone in a position of power, supernatural power, that is, whose denial of life and wholeness is also one of discrimination and exclusivity. The episode is tense, upsetting and complicated.



I cannot speak for you, but such is certainly true for myself and in fact, the same appears to be true for the author of the Gospel of Mark who locates a tired and possibly quite aggravated Jesus in the region of Thyre, a Gentile dominated territory. It is hard to imagine Jesus being at ease. He is alone, attempting to go unnoticed in a house in a region in which there is some history of animosity between the Jews and the Gentiles.

What does it look like to value our children?

Join us for worship this Sunday, August 8, for Holy Eucharist, Rite II with music. with The Rev. Melanie Slane Celebrant and The Rev. Dr. Herschel Wade, Preacher.


This worship service is also available live at 9:00 am on Sunday, and as a video following that at https://www.redeemer-cincy.org/online-worship/

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I need to say this, by the way, in this conversation, if I don't say this, I will be very remiss. Anger and hatred are not the same thing. And many of you were raised, especially women, were raised to believe that anger was bad and you should not have it or keep it to yourself. We were taught that you shouldn't be angry about anything.

And you might be worried that what I'm saying right now is that you should never be angry because that's bad friends. Anger is not inherently bad. In fact, anger is a very natural part of our lives. Anger is a base emotion that we all must have sometimes. In fact , there is a problem if you see injustice, hatred, violence, murder, oppression, cruelty, and hatred, and anger does not arise in you.

We're supposed to feel angry in the face of that which is deeply wrong. I'm not saying don't be angry, but as the epistle writer James says, your anger is not the thing that makes God righteous. We do not want to allow our anger to become self-righteous.

Join us for worship this Sunday, September 1, for Holy Eucharist, Rite II with music. with The Rev. Philip DeVaul, Celebrant and Preacher.


This worship service is also available live at 9:00 am on Sunday, and as a video following that at https://www.redeemer-cincy.org/online-worship/

We pray that God will take ordinary things. Things like bread and wine and water and oil and use those ordinary elements to convey God's extraordinary grace and love. It matters. It matters that we recognize these gifts from God and it matters too that we acknowledge the reality of evil. I don't envision a return to three years preparation for baptism, or it's once a year occasion, or even necessarily that whole facing west and facing east business that our forebears practiced. But I do give thanks for the fact that we hold those ancient promises That we reaffirm those renunciations and those affirmations every time we renew the promises of our baptism


The Apostle Paul probably wrote the letter to the church at Ephesus, which has been the focus of your preaching series over these last weeks, while he was in prison in Rome after his third missionary journey. Paul would have visited that region three times over the course of his ministry. First, just for a few months to establish the church, establishing also leaders in that place who would continue the ministry that he had begun. And later in his second voyage, for three years, he stayed with the Ephesians. And finally, he went back as part of his last journey to Jerusalem. Over that time, Paul saw the church grow into a body of multiple cultures.


In his letter, Paul teaches that through Christ all creation has been reconciled to God. In doing that, God has reconciled all of us to each other, and so because we are reconciled to God, because we're reconciled to one another, God calls us to live differently.


To live as a people who have been transformed.

Join us for worship this Sunday, August 25, for Holy Eucharist, Rite II with Baptism, Confirmation and Reception with Bishop Kristin Uffelman White Celebrant and Preacher.


This worship service is also available live at 9:00 am on Sunday, and as a video following that at https://www.redeemer-cincy.org/online-worship/

Did you know that our bones are constantly breaking themselves down and building themselves back up again? You probably did know that. Most of you are better at knowing scientific things than me – it’s not my strong suit. But I learned this about bones as an adult and it really blew me away. In the simplest terms, you have these things called osteoclasts that are constantly dissolving your old bone tissue. Meanwhile you also have osteoblasts that spend their time building new bone tissue. This is happening inside you constantly. It’s a very natural and normal thing – the breaking down and building up.

We all understand bones in terms of the stability and structure they bring to our bodies. So, at first for me it was counterintuitive to hear that part of their healthy process was that they were breaking down all the time. For most of my life, I have associated stability and structure with something like immobility. You want your house built on a strong foundation. And we often find great comfort in the idea of changelessness, of things remaining the same. When life deviates from our expectations, we seek to get back to normal, to something that resembles stasis because that feels safe. As the old hymn proclaims, “Like a tree planted by the water, I shall not be moved.”

But it turns out I’m moving all the time. These little invisible things within my very body are moving, tearing my foundation down and building it back up again all day every day. These strong bones are anything but static and immovable, and my desire to understand that has helped me learn to accept that change is inevitable.

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