I fondly remember the day at the 2006 session of the Virginia Annual Conference when we paused from the business of the day to recreate the General Conference debate fifty years prior which would grant full clergy rights to women.
In my twenty years of ministry, I have had the opportunity to work with several wonderful women who were faithful clergy colleagues and gifted servants of Christ.
Yet while we have granted equal clergy rights to women, sixty years has not closed the pay gap between men and women clergy.
he full manuscript for today’s sermon, which is the first in this series. 
I remember that it was a about fifteen years ago, that it was a Sunday, and we were in that short period of time between Sunday School and the 11:00 service when she told us. Her name was Edith Woods, a woman in her seventies, and on that particular Sunday, she was characteristically poised and elegant.
Adam Hamilton, author and founding pastor of the 20,000 member United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas offers 
Sunday night, I was answering questions posed to me by members of our Youth Group when I was asked this question: “Why are we having a sermon series on death anyway?” It is a good and fair question that I have been waiting for someone to ask me. Here is why:
A little over twenty years ago, as I was preparing for my own ordination, I read somewhere that there are essentially five milestones in the Christian life. Some of us experience all of them, while others only experience a few. These milestones are birth, baptism, confirmation, marriage, and death.
Remember that time in January, 2016 when we cancelled worship because of a blizzard and I recorded a sermon on Christian unity and put it on YouTube? Me either! At any rate, here it is. If you look carefully, you can see that I am doing everything in my power to avoid moving because the chair I was sitting in was so squeaky. 
What follows are the words to a hymn I wrote years ago for a Virginia Conference United Methodist devotional guide called “A Summer Read.” We used it in worship on April 10, 2016 as part of our
