TEXTS For SERMON: Isaiah 9:2-4; "The Fish" by Mary Oliver; Matthew 4:12-23 There are so many times a poem is better than a story and this morning, I would prefer to riff on Mary Oliver’s fish … [Read more...]
“Don’t Get Sucked In!”
I’m pretty sure this is old news – not fake news, just old news – as in, I have mentioned it before. But I was back home in Indiana this week and so it is on my mind. In my hometown of … [Read more...]
Opening the Mind with a New Lens
Some teacher, sometime along the way, likely soured you on poetry. It was done by making you read stiff poems, written in an alien parlance with old-fashioned metaphors, and then insisting you explain … [Read more...]
Mary Oliver, Thank You
Mary Oliver, thank you. The simple elegance of your poems exquisitely mirrors what is miraculous in nature – that out of seemingly simple elements placed in fortunate proximity and serendipitous … [Read more...]
A Definite Maybe
This sermon should be entitled, “What’s wrong with maybe?” “You wouldn’t believe what once or twice I have seen,” Mary Oliver writes, and she tells us the world is wider than the “rigid house … [Read more...]
Poetry
Billy Collins, former United States Poet Laureate, has a humorous poem (“Introduction to Poetry”) that I read as an explanation for why poetry is repugnant to so many people: …But all they want to … [Read more...]
Life
Life crawls upward and weeps into the light through one small pore even while bursting through the hard wood of the bark in another place. Late last summer we cut down three pine trees in the yard … [Read more...]
Playing Cute with God, a reflection on “The Journey” by Mary Oliver
Link to Journey: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/356684-the-journey-one-day-you-finally-knew-what-you-had It is true you know, the only life you can save is your own. Maybe it is because of what … [Read more...]
A Wednesday Rant: Loving Judas
Archive Rant Adapted from a presentation delivered to a 12-Step Worship in 2012 “We do not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.” (C … [Read more...]