Hard Sayings of Christ's Gracious Kingdom
By Elisabeth Kincaid, Ph.D.
The following sermon was delivered at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Grand Haven, Michigan, in 2019 by Dr. Elisabeth Kincaid, Assistant Professor of Ethics and Moral Theology at Nashotah House Theological Seminary, for the Tenth Sunday After Pentecost. Here Dr. Kincaid asks us to consider the hard sayings of Jesus and to understand that the “reality of God’s presence should make us uncomfortable … it should jolt us out of our established patterns.”
Dr. Kincaid received her Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Notre Dame, where her dissertation focused on reclaiming the theological jurisprudence of the sixteenth-century Spanish theologian and legal scholar, Francisco Suárez. Dr. Kincaid received her B.A. from Rice University, her J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law, and her M.T.S. from Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. She is an Episcopal Church Foundation Academic Fellow. She has also practiced law at a national law firm, worked at a private equity fund-of-funds, and served as a graduate campus minister to law and business students. She is married to the Rev. Thomas Kincaid, and they have two children.
Dr. Kincaid’s publications include “Settling Law: Francisco Suarez’s Theory of Custom for Contemporary Contexts” in Francisco Suárez (1548–1617): Jesuits and the Complexities of Modernity (Brill, April 2019), “Aquinas, Pinckaers, and the Retrieval of a Doctrine of Political Equity ” in The Journal of Moral Theology (May 2019), and “ ‘Sharers in the Divine Image’: Francisco Suárez and the Justification of Female Political Authority” in Political Theology (March 2018). Kincaid has written popular articles for Christianity Today and The Living Church and has presented numerous academic conference papers, including at The Society of Christian Ethics, The Catholic Theological Society of America, The American Academy of Religion, The School of Law of the Pontifical University of Chile, and the International Symposium in Jesuit Studies. She has also been an invited guest speaker at several popular conferences on topics such as “Anglo-Catholicism: Recovering Roots,” “Mission Theology in the Anglican Communion,” and “Anglo-Catholicism and the Common Good.”
Sermon by Dr. Elisabeth Kincaid, Assistant Professor at Nashotah House Theological Seminary, for the 10th Sunday After Pentecost, 2019