Fear and Its Friends: A Poem for Lent 1
hope
Self-Care Advent Calendar 2021 and Weekly Advent Prayers
Advent calendar 2021 and weekly Advent prayers Year C
Birthpangs or False Labor: A Prophetic Sermon on Mark 13:1-8
If we watch the news, it’s easy to conclude that we are on the brink of a biblical apocalypse. There is war and always rumors of more. Then there are fires, floods, earthquakes, famine, and more. Add in pandemic and those who look to the Bible to predict the way of things will tell us … Read More
We are (or could be) the New Jerusalem: A Sermon for All Saints on Revelation 21:1-6a
? What if this passage is meant to be descriptive – what could happen – rather than prescriptive – what God will do? What if it is our responsibility to be the New Jerusalem and make room for God to live among us?
Changing the Question and Rembering the Whirlwind: Reflections on Mark 10:35-45 and Job 38:1-7
We’re still asking the same wrong question that James and John asked Jesus so many years ago. We pray with the idea that we want God to do “whatever we ask.”
Whoever is Not Against Us is For Us (Mark 9:38-50)
“Whoever is not against us, is for us.” Jesus’ simple, countercultural statement is the key to liberation and unity. If we stop fighting with each other about who has the “right” way to be Christian and unite to demand equity and justice for all those whom the Empire devalues, we could truly change the world. Jesus didn’t care that people outside of his disciples were healing in his name. It was a good thing. Love was brought into the world. If people are bringing Divine Love into the world, bringing healing, hope, justice, why should we care what their religious affiliation is? If lives are saved, then it is good work.
A Place for All: Thoughts on James 3 and Mark 9
Every single one of us has value as God’s beloved. It does not matter who we are, what we do, what we have, what we don’t do, the good we’ve done, the harm we’ve wrought. God loves and claims us all as beloved. We all have value right now, as we are – broken or whole or somewhere in between. Queer, straight, cis, Trans*, rich, poor, healthy, sick, black, white, brown, red, yellow, educated, uneducated, smart, intellectually impaired, wise, foolish, temporarily able-bodied, disabled, mentally healthy, mentally ill, and all the other unique and wonderful combination of things that make us human. We have a place in the Kingdom. We are called to be Kingdom-builders, all of us – each doing their individual part connected to the whole.
Break the Silence; Shatter the Stigma – Talk about Suicide Now
Suicide is one of the most important topics we should be discussing in faith communities and it is the one topic most readily avoided. We believe a lot of misinformation about suicide. We think adolescents have the highest risk, and as a whole they do. However, did you know that middle-aged white men now have the highest rates of suicide? Suicide remains the tenth leading cause of death in the U.S. with a growing number of older adults dying by suicide. Churches really need to have this difficult conversation because we have the capacity and the resources to save lives.
What Does it Mean to “Be Opened”?
“Be opened” are the perfect words to follow into a few days of retreat. Jesus spoke them into the ears of a man who could not hear or speak. The interesting thing is that he spoke these words, “Be opened” just after a Syrophoenician woman challenged his notions of who was important and who wasn’t.
Living Bread, Living Water
Jesus said some weird stuff and the end of John 6 is the top of the list. Here Jesus talks about eating his flesh and drinking his blood to gain eternal life. It’s baffling even when we don’t take scripture literally. It’s hard to know what Jesus really intended here. Yes, it can be a foreshadowing of the Passover meal to come. Yet, I think he meant more than the eucharistic sharing of bread and cup. I suspect that all this weirdness about eating flesh and drinking blood has to do with how we live, a metaphor for embodying all that Jesus did and taught. Is this any less weird? Maybe not…