Saint John's Cathedral

Saint John's Cathedral in Denver posts its sermons here, and the archive is substantial — more than six hundred episodes deep. The organizing principle is the church calendar, not a subject list. Episodes carry the names of the days they were preached on: the Fifth Sunday in Lent, the Nativity of Our Lord on Christmas Eve, the Presentation of Our Lord. That means the appointed readings drive the content, and the preacher's job is to meet them where they land. The sermons share a recognizable shape. They open small. One begins with nights in a Denver apartment when a train horn carries through an open door, sounding like a boat far out at sea, and the preacher wakes convinced it is Judgment Day. Another recalls a fall windstorm, things pulled off a balcony, doors that turned out not to be airtight, and wind coming through like trumpets. A third starts after a Christmas pageant, on the walk down to the parish hall, when a fourth grader named J.D. asked what a virgin is. These are not warm-up anecdotes discarded once the real sermon starts. They set the terms. Then the text takes over, and it is handled seriously. Lazarus coming out of the grave in the fifth week of Lent gets flagged as a surprise, a reading that feels more like Easter than penitence — a foretaste. Ezekiel's valley of dry bones gets pressed hard: how did a multitude that large end up unburied in one place, and the answer offered is war, brother against brother, upheaval so violent no one was left to bury anyone. The preacher then turns the question outward. What would our valley of bones hold? An illustration from the Saint John's Bible showing a pile of glasses, cars, skyscrapers with their windows blown out. The image is called unsettling precisely because it is familiar. Elsewhere the question is what makes someone prophetic, and the answer runs from Malachi, Isaiah, Micah, Amos and John the Baptist straight through to Albert Raboteau's writing and a roll call that includes Abraham Heschel, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, A.J. Mist, Dorothy Day, Howard Thurman, Fannie Lou Hamer and Jonathan Myrick Daniels. Simeon and Anna are held up as the model. Mary is treated with unusual generosity — someone who, angel or no angel, might reasonably have wondered whether she was still thinking clearly, and who goes looking for prophets without quite knowing that is what she is doing. Endings are prayers, not conclusions. May we be willing to behold the valleys of dry bones around us and within us. May we be courageous. Amen. The register is literate and unhurried, comfortable with silence and with hard images, and it never rushes to comfort.