Due to the elevated COVID-19 risk in Chemung County, The Park Church is following CDC guidelines. Facemasks must be worn at all times while in the building. As of Sunday, November 14, participation in worship services at The Park Church will require proof of vaccination for all those eligible to be vaccinated. This requirement will also include the Christmas Eve 7:30 PM service. Singing and coffee hour are currently suspended.
Sermons
Text of sermons preached by The Rev. J. Gary Brinn, Pastor and Teacher of The Park Church. Scripture readings reference the Common English Bible.
December 19, 2021
Love Actually
📖 Readings are from Love Actually, by Richard Curtis and Luke 1:39-45
December 12, 2021
Happy Happy! Joy Joy!
📖 Readings are from Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman, and Isaiah 12:2-6.
December 5, 2021
📖 Readings are from from The Sacred Pipe and Luke 3:1-6.
Many years ago, I did what was once called the “Grand Tour,” most of a year spent backpacking around Europe. It was both and education and an escape from a stuck place, a reset button in the game of life. While there, I discovered a particular jest, often in the form of coffee mugs and t-shirts, that went something like this: Read the full text.
November 28, 2021
Though he was Swiss, born in Basel, the Reform Protestant Theologian Karl Barth was teaching in Bonn, Germany when Adolph Hitler rose to power. Barth lost his position there when he refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the Führer, and went on to be the primary author of the Barmen Declaration, the theological argument against making the German churches subservient to the Third Reich. Read the full text.
November 21, 2021
Christ the King/Reign of Christ/Kin-dom of God
📖 Readings are from Critical Path by R. Buckminster Fuller and John 18:33-37 (CEB)
I am too young to be a hippie, too old to be a hipster, and I’m not quite at the broken hip stage of things yet, but I have always tried to be a little hip, have always had a slightly funky edge, despite my upbringing in the Stars and Bars-waving working-class South. Read the full text.
November 14, 2021
Swords and Bullets, Bombs and Drones: A Faithful Response to Human Violence
📖 Readings are from Matthew 24: 1-8
We were a couple of hours into a journey that would take most of the day, a ferry down the Rio Escondido toward Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast. Read the full text.
November 7, 2021
📖 Readings are from Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck and Mark 12:38-44
Moving is never fun, even when you are moving somewhere you want to go. Things get lost… my old Scout and Army uniforms disappeared in a move years ago. Stuff gets broken. Mostly, it is just stuff, like the cheap Target lamp that didn’t survive the trip to Elmira. Read the full text.
October 31, 2021
Back in the olden days, when we used to go to the cineplex… You remember movie theaters, right? Read the full text
October 17, 2021
📖 Readings are from Psalm 91:1-7 and Mark 10:35-45
It is a sign of our extreme peril that when I speak of Siwanatorz, Beliebers, and the Beyhive, I must explain, but I can say “Just the facts, ma’am,” and almost everyone in the room is old enough to know I am referencing Joe Friday on Dragnet, a television program that broadcast its last episode a half century ago. Nonetheless, we start our engagement with today’s gospel reading with “Just the facts.” Read the full text
October 10
On Camels, Covenant, and Reparations
Birth is a crap shoot. No one chooses their family of origin, their gender assignment at birth, the nation-state of which they are a citizen, or worse still, being born state-less, as is true for the Muslim Rohingya of Myanmar and a growing number of Muslims in India who are being stripped of their citizenship by Narendra Modi’s racist Bharatiya Janata Party, better known as the BJP.
October 3
World Communion Sunday – Dangerous Food and Good Booze
“I’m OK – You’re OK” was a 1967 self-help book by Thomas Anthony Harris. You may have read it. Heck, it may have changed your life. Me? I’m more Gen X than Baby Boom, more Nirvana than Beatles, so not really my thing. Besides, I’m more like my esteemed colleague The Rev. Otis Moss III, who is beginning a sermon series titled “I Am NOT Okay.”