Milton Brasher-Cunningham's Blog

As I begin another year of writing each day during Advent, beginning with the sermon I preached this morning seems right. It is where the season is starting for me: in the shared space of life in my congregation. I am not following the lectionary this week and took Isaiah 35:1-10 as the jumping off […]

Though the history of our Thanksgiving holiday is complicated and layered, observing a Sunday of Thanks feels worthy in any season. Here is my sermon this week. May we all find reasons for gratitude in the midst of everything. ___________________________ I ran into my friends Becky and Dave while I was grocery shopping yesterday. Becky […]

This week I preached on a passage that never shows up in the lectionary cycle: the parable Jesus told right after his encounter with Zacchaeus. It is not an easy story to digest, but it felt worth talking about. _______________________ If you were to pick up a poetry anthology for a high school or college […]

This week’s sermon continues working through the end of Luke’s gospel, as the lectionary year draws to a close, finding Zacchaeus by the shore of the Great Salt Lake. ______________________ On our recent whirlwind trip to Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho, Ginger and I were reading about the Great Salt Lake and I learned a term […]

Here is my sermon for All Saints Sunday, based on Luke’s version of Jesus’ beatitudes and woes. ______________________________ Years ago, I was a member of a wonderful church in Dallas called Royal Lane Baptist Church. They, like many Baptist churches, had a tradition of a Wednesday night meal and prayer service. On most Wednesdays, we […]

My sermon on Jesus’ parable of the pharisee and the tax collector hinges on a re-translation by Amy-Jill Levine that opened up the story for me. __________________________ In the early days of Saturday Night Live, one of the repeating characters was a priest named Father Guido Sarducci. He was not a priest of course, but […]

My sermon this week is from a parable of Jesus often called “The Persistent Widow.” It is not one of my favorites but seemed worth wrestling with. What I found is the title shares the story short. There’s a lot going on in the parable worth talking about. _____________________________ I grew up in a family […]

We almost had a show-and-tell sermon this morning. I seriously thought about bringing Elena, one of our Schnauzer rescue pups. We have had her almost two years, though we got her thinking it was a hospice situation and she would only be with us for a couple of months. We were going to be her […]

It’s getting down to crunch time in the baseball season, which means it doesn’t take much for my sermon to intersect with the Red Sox. Here’s what I said on Sunday. ________________________________ In the fall of 2004, I was the Associate Pastor of the First Congregational Church of Hanover, Massachusetts, which is about halfway between […]

Last week’s lectionary passage is one of my favorites. Here’s what I had to say on Sunday. __________________________ Right after Ginger and I got back from our trip to Durham last month, we noticed a plant that had sprung up along our back fence line. It was not there because we planted it, but since […]