Jesus never enters a home unless invited. He never heals unless asked. When he encounters a blind man calling out on a roadside, he doesn’t immediately heal his vision. Instead, he says, “what do you want me to do for you?” In that question he acknowledges the autonomy and personhood of the one in front of him. If we want to follow Mary in following Jesus, if we want to offer our help to those we encounter in need, then we must learn to hear and listen. We have to take the time to be develop relationships with particular people who have names and stories and gifts to offer.
Read MoreAmos will not back down. He is determined to reiterate that the people are chosen not for privilege but for purpose. But because they continue to rest in their privilege and ignore the needs of others in their community, a reckoning is on its way. Salvation, Amos practically screams, is not a result of privilege. It is not even a side effect or accessory. Being chosen is not an easy or comfortable journey.
Read MoreIf almost anyone in this story had decided to stick to their principles, to weigh potential lives lost against Naaman’s, or simply to follow the rules of land, Naaman would not have been healed. So why didn’t they? How exactly is God at work in the lives of these people? Why is this story told this way in Holy Scripture?
Read Morepreaching is like being on the cooking show “Chopped." You look at your ingredient basket and have to figure out what to make. Here’s what’s in the basket this week: an epic heat wave, more gun violence and this time at an Episcopal Church, Juneteenth, the January 6 hearings, a pandemic that just keeps going, Father’s Day, and of course, the main ingredient this morning, the Gerasene demoniac. And the clock starts now.
Read MoreThe Trinity may seem a strange concept, and it is. It may seem mysterious and hard to grasp, that’s for certain. But in the Trinity we can see the beauty of a God who desires our place at the table and is willing to enter even our suffering to bring us there.
Read MoreLet’s dream about a world in which gun violence is eliminated and loneliness is overcome. Let’s dream about a world in which poverty is eradicated and all kinds of shackles broken. Let’s dream about a world in which racism is dismantled and our ecosystems are restored to their Garen of Eden glory. Let’s dream about a world in which people hear in their own language the good news that they are included in God’s saving grace. Or, in the words of the prophet Joel, that all who call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
Read MoreIt is interesting that no one mentions everlasting life in this story. The jailer does not ask for bodily healing. No one has died and must be resurrected. When the jailer asks, what must I do to be saved?, I think perhaps he means saved from the emotional and spiritual agony he is experiencing; saved from the weight of the world on his shoulders. The jailer can see that while he may be free from incarceration, it is Paul and Silas who are truly free.
Read MoreWith the disciples tonight we pause and we pray. In the midst of the storm, we pray for hope, for courage, for one another’s needs, and for healing for all those in the midst of trauma. In this sacred pause, we add a prayer of thanksgiving for the one who ascended in order to fill all in all. And tonight we wait, not just to rest in the storm, but in expectation of big things yet to come from God. We wait on the Spirit to come soon, and send us out.
Read MoreWe have different ways we talk about trees. Go camping in a National Forest and we might remark about of the beautiful trees around us. Get a logging contract for that same forest and we’d talk about the timber. Biblical Greek is no different. Dendron is the word for tree, the kind you might see camping, but the word xulon—that meant timber or lumber. And strangely it is xulon that is the word used in Revelation for the tree beside the river. What we read as “the tree of life” could more literally be translated as “the timber of life.” Not quite the same ring to it, but it is an accurate rendering.
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Warhol’s Last Supper of da Vinci’s painting covered in bright colorful stripes hangs in my office to remind me of something essential about Christ Church. Like the image, we are a mash up of the historical and the contemporary, of tradition and modern engagement. We are anchored in ancient liturgy, music, and prayer, in sacred texts and the stories of Christ. And we are engaged in the search for meaning and ministry in a very modern world.
Read MoreWhat we see today in the Book of Acts is nothing less than the risen Jesus in the form of a fisherman turned disciple, turned deserter, turned apostle. If you need some assurance that this is what the author is trying to get across, look at the people’s reaction to the healing. Luke tells us that after seeing it, they believed, but believed not in Peter, but in the Lord. They were, as we would say in our baptismal covenant, finding in all persons the Christ whom we seek.
Read MoreOn the road to Damascus, in that long war torn land of Syria, Saul had an encounter with disruption of a different kind—an encounter that changed his identity and name. Instead of bringing change into the world through violence, he was changed by the one who had taken the violence of the world onto himself. Paul met Jesus and through the disruption of his life he found what he was looking for—a life of reconciliation with God and neighbor that can only come through a letting go. Paul found healing disruption, not by bringing a resistant world into order through violence, but by joining Jesus on the cross. It was through way of the cross, Paul found, that resurrection and the healing he’d so long sought could finally be realized.
Read MoreIt’s true that Holy Week and Easter can leave clergy, church staff, and other volunteers a little fried. After all the hours spent planning and implementing programs and worship services to observe Christ’s final days, his death, and his resurrection, there’s not much brain space left. The week after Easter can leave us wondering… now what? And this is not just a practical question about what to do with our time and energy. It’s also a theological one. Christ is risen, now what? What do we do after resurrection?
Read MoreIf you happen to be feeling disconnected these days, or a little awkward in community or like you can’t quite remember some important things, you’ve come to the right place. There are a couple of angels in dazzling clothes with a message for you. Remember what Jesus told you - that he would be crucified and on the third day rise again. Remember what else he told you. That no matter how much you have forgotten, or how much you’ve lost or how far you’ve wandered, God is re-membering you, piecing you back together and re-connecting us all to God’s much bigger story.
Read MoreBaptism, for Paul, is a means of practicing death and as such it is the door to freedom. That’s what we heard tonight from the Epistle to the Roman. Our attention this week has been on Jesus, and rightly so, but Paul reminds us that our call is to join with Jesus in his death, to participate with him in the crucifixion. The call to discipleship we answer in our baptism is, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer once put it, an invitation to “come and die.” And through this practice of death we have been made free.
Read MoreAs usual, scripture is not historical relic, but current commentary. Habakkuk says that what will expose the unjust (that is, what will expose sinful humanity) is when the stones from the wall cry out, or literally when the dissembling stones crash down with a loud noise, and what had been hidden on the other side of the wall will be seen. That is what Jesus is telling those in power: his entry into Jerusalem and all that will happen there, including his own suffering, is a precursor to sin being laid bare. Injustice won’t be able to hide forever. The ultimate good news of the story of Jesus and his love for those who stand outside the wall is that stones will shout and walls will come tumbling down
Read MoreSo Christ’s wisdom from today’s Gospel passage is timely. Our life of devotion is important, and so is our service to those in need. But when we find ourselves facing the Cross, whether in the midst of Lent or at the death of a loved one, or any encounter with true sacrifice, the cost becomes irrelevant. We give everything we have to God.
Read MoreIn his stories, Jesus often presents two kinds of people - the prodigal son and the older brother, the tax collector and the Pharisee, the wheat and the chaff, the sheep and the goats, the prepared mom and the unprepared mom at the DMV.. The truth is we are both kinds with some regularity. When we’ve screwed things up and wandered far from God, Jesus wants us to remember God’s mercy. And when we have our act a little more together, we need to extend that same mercy to those who don’t.
Read MoreLike many of you, I’ve been troubled by the news from Ukraine. Children like mine playing among cots in makeshift shelters. A maternity hospital bombed. Journalists shot by Russian soldiers. I listened to an interview this last week with a Ukrainian pastor whose seminary was hit by missiles, his office demolished, and all his books lost. Still, every day he goes out and cares for the vulnerable and feeds the hungry.
How do we understand all of this—only the most recent in a series of human disasters? When questions like these come to me, I often find myself wandering back to the advice of Karl Barth—a theologian and pastor who supported the German churches that refused to pledge their allegiance to the Nazi state.
Read MoreIn a world filled with every kind of predator from a snake to a teenage driver, the waterfowl in my neighborhood have to work so hard just to keep their young safe and healthy. I’ve learned that with birds, as with people, children sure do make that work difficult. In Luke’s Gospel this morning, Jesus laments how often he has desired to gather his children together in Jerusalem as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but they were not willing.
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