On this page, you will find a selection of Bishop Lee’s speeches and sermons.
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” (Jeremiah 29:11) Dear Members and Friends of the Diocese of Chicago: Last year I told one of my priest friends, “Make sure you give your congregation…
The Coming And God held in his hand A small globe. Look he said. The son looked. Far off, As through water, he saw A scorched land of fierce Colour. The light burned There; crusted buildings Cast their shadows: a bright Serpent, a river Uncoiled itself, radiant With slime. On a bare Hill a…
Watch the sermon on YouTube. Some of you might remember about a year ago, in those bygone days when we actually used to be able to meet in person, and in what I thought would be my last convention as the bishop of this diocese, I preached a sermon titled, “Bishops Come and Bishops Go.”…
Dear Friends in Christ, In making and renewing the vows of Holy Baptism, we commit ourselves to seek and serve Christ in every person, and to do so by striving for justice and peace among all people. In other words, we promise to put our faith into practice. Faith is not simply a matter of…
Dear People of God: Like many of you, I spend more time online these days. Recently, the hopeful face of a young black man named Ahmaud Arbery has appeared again and again in the newspapers I read and the social media feeds I scroll. In February, Arbery was jogging unarmed near his home in Georgia…
In Bishop Lee’s Easter sermon, he compares this Easter to the first one, when the disciples didn’t know at first what had happened. “Easter is rarely obvious in its reality,” he says. “God is at work even in the midst of this, no less than God was at work in the reality of the cross…
In his Good Friday message, Bishop Lee says that the grief being experienced across the world right now “can be made endurable when we are sunk deep into the mystery of Christ’s having gone there before us. We follow a Lord who has walked straight into the fearful reality of death and emerged, and emerged…
In his message for Maundy Thursday, Bishop Lee reflects on the way Jesus’ care for the bodies of his disciples is reflected in the way bodies are held in God’s embrace through the work of caregivers during the pandemic. “Never forget that our call is to tend the body of Christ not just in the…
In his Palm Sunday sermon, Bishop Lee reflects on theologian Robert Capon’s observation that Jesus was crucified because he “did not meet the expectations of what messiah would look like, of what the salvation promised by God would be.” “We’re not fished out of our humanity–that’s not what Jesus came for,” says Bishop Lee. “Jesus…
Earlier this week, Bishop Lee recorded a sermon for the fifth Sunday in Lent from his home in Chicago. His text is John 11: 1-45, the gospel reading for the day, which is story of Jesus raising his friend Lazarus from the dead.
