What is a sermon?  Sermons bring reality and life to the passages we read in the Bible.  Although each member of St. John's clergy has their own unique style, look to sermons at St. John's to reflect the meaning of the written word to our daily lives.  The following excerpt from a sermon describes this philosophy well:

"Anthony De Mello, an Indian Jesuit priest, was a great collector of wisdom and religious stories from throughout the ages; he died towards the end of the 20th century. One of his stories is about a poet who is sitting on his porch one evening bent over a vessel of water. His neighbor walks by and hails him, saying, "Can I ask, what are you doing?"  The man replies, "I am contemplating the reflection of the moon in a bowl of water."

Now the neighbor is a bit puzzled by this and says, "Why are you doing that? Unless you’ve got a broken neck, why don’t you just turn around and look directly at the real thing?"

De Mello offers a commentary to the story. He says, "Words are inadequate reflections of reality." He imagines a man who sees a piece of marble and is told that the Taj Mahal is made of marble. The man says, "Well I can see what it is, it’s just a collection of these bits of marble put together;" or a man who is given a bucket of water from Niagara and imagines that because the Falls is just more of that water, he has somehow seen the Falls."