St. Alban's Sermons

St. Alban's Sermons collects the Sunday preaching of an Episcopal church in Waco, Texas. Each episode is a single sermon, and each title names the preacher and the Sunday it was given, so the feed reads like a liturgical calendar with a byline. The preacher changes across the recent run. The Rev. Aaron M. G. Zimmerman, who describes arriving at St. Alban's nine years earlier, appears more than once; The Rev. Janice Krause, The Rev. Dr. Andrew Armond, and The Rev. Kara Leslie each preach a Sunday; and David Zahl, who says at the top that he is not on the church's staff, takes Zacchaeus and calls what happens to him one-way love. A listener is not signing up for one voice, then, but the shape stays constant. A short prayer, an invitation to sit, and an opening story that is rarely about church. Krause tells a joke about two nuns, a stalled car, and a clean bedpan. Zimmerman explains the shields on a starship, Star Wars or Star Trek, and suggests people carry the same invisible armor. Armond traces 'Keep Austin Weird' to a librarian phoning in a radio pledge in 2000. Leslie recalls driving the wrong way down four Waco streets in twenty minutes and being set straight by honking drivers. These stories do real work, because the turn from them to scripture is where each sermon makes its argument. Zacchaeus gives away the money that owned him while the crowd grumbles about the company Jesus keeps. Dives asks Abraham for a single drop of water across a chasm with no bridge and no zipline. Krause moves from the joke to a sign in a Dallas cathedral: joy is not the absence of suffering but the presence of God. The Gospel of Luke is named as a source, and the retellings stay close to the text; Zahl cites the verse in which the onlookers complain. Where the preachers converge is on grace, described in different vocabularies but with the same direction of travel, from God outward to people who did not earn it. Zimmerman says a person's name and identity are given, not achieved, and passes along the church's unofficial slogan: bring your baggage, leave it here. Armond calls it God's holy weirdness and radically equalizing grace, and argues that the parables were built to shock. Leslie says Jesus is more patient with people than they are with themselves. Zahl closes on the words 'Because I love you.' For a newcomer to the feed, 'Bring Your Baggage, Leave It Here' is the sermon that explains the church's sense of itself, while 'Keep Jesus Weird' is the clearest statement of how it reads the parables. Nothing here is packaged for a podcast; it is a congregation's Sunday morning with the prayers and the 'please be seated' left in, and that is much of the appeal.