My neighbor’s peonies blossomed long before mine and are bigger and more vibrant. What gives? Perhaps she is better than me, and that means her peonies are superior too. I mean, maybe she has done … [Read more...]
A Bloody Mess
This sermon is a bloody mess. Literally. This story from Genesis 15 depicts a bloody mess, and it is the mythology underneath a bloody mess. First of all, we should notice some huge problems … [Read more...]
Christmas Eve 2018: Gulping Milk and Knowing Presence
Merry Christmas. This may not seem like a Christmas sermon at first, but wait for it. When we were small the world was liquid and grown-ups poured it into us, sometimes in small … [Read more...]
God is Manna
Well, preparing for today was humbling and challenging. Last week, inspired by the birth of my grandson, I reached for the intangible. I sought to capture an experience rather than define or … [Read more...]
Recognizing One Another
I had a recent facetime call with a friend who is in seminary. She was exhilarated by the intellectual stimulation of learning about the Hebrew Scripture as well as New Testament … [Read more...]
God
800 BCE, first known mention of the God of Israel Text for Preaching Exodus 3:1-15 Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the … [Read more...]
Evil Part Two: We don’t want to know what absence would feel like
Presence…God has to be present in order to influence change. If God were not present - absent - our experience of life would be radically different. Strangely, presence and absence can be equally … [Read more...]
Evil Part One: An Email thread post-Paris
This is a two-part rant that probably does not belong the week before Christmas, but neither do mass shootings or national political leaders vomiting their own ugliness on the rest of us belong in the … [Read more...]
We won’t encounter God in the past or the future
Summer arrived in mid-August. Perhaps it was the severity and length of last winter that so raised the expectations for summer that even the most sublime growing season could not fill the empty space … [Read more...]