We take comfort today in Jesus’ words, that Trudie knew the way to heaven, and that she is in a dwelling place built just for her. Her joy is complete. Whatever unfinished coding projects she had are now done. I imagine Trudie has already found the library in heaven and is working on a paper to present to the other angels about the glitches in our human operating system. Like her friends and family in this life, the angels will be blessed to know her.
Read MoreReading the story of the binding of Isaac in our age, might strike us as an encounter with a primitive god, a dark picture that bears no likeness to the enlightened faith we’d like to claim. And yet I think we need this story now more than ever. Ours is a world that desires to control more and more, to solve every problem, to heal every wound. And while that might seem good on the surface, it makes it impossible for us to live into the fact of our limits, our vulnerability, the absurd pieces of our life that could never fit in some neat rational system. Faith, hope, and love are not achievable by algorithm or formula, or knowable beyond the risk of faith.
Read MoreWhen God doesn’t fix things, how do we give thanks then? What does our faith have to offer when things go wrong? You can’t find a better story in the Bible to shed light on those questions than the one about Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar. The Book of Genesis is filled with faithful people doing good and faithful things. But there are plenty of painful events, too, ones in which God doesn’t provide a rescue or a happy ending. Those stories provide a different kind of witness, one that is honest and useful when things go terribly wrong.
Read MoreHospitality is one of those words that is often overused and underdefined. It would be easy to think of this critical act only in terms of dinner parties and festive receptions, of attentive hosts and lavish welcomes. And all of those things could be a part of hospitality. In its roots, however, we find a more dangerous reality. The word hospitality means, most literally, welcoming the stranger, and the stranger in the ancient world was as often as not an enemy. The word host, in fact, comes from the Latin hostis which means enemy as well as stranger. To the ancient understanding an encounter with some unknown person could end with a curse as much as blessing. And yet, in the vulnerable world of nomads in the arid lands through which Abraham traveled, reliance on strangers was as necessary as it was perilous. Good hospitality, then, was a way of welcoming a stranger so that instead of ending up enemies, both parties left as friends.
Read MoreAbram teaches us that altars are places where we give to God and God gives to us, and this is reiterated over and over again in scripture. Altars come in all shapes and sizes. They are tables like any other, but what we do there sets them apart. During the early days of the pandemic, when we couldn’t worship all together, many of you made altars in your homes. Some of you lit candles there or kept your rosary on it. Some of you set up altars near your televisions or screens so that you could watch virtual services and participate from your own space.
Read MoreThe gift of diversity that was revealed at Babel was not taken away at the first Pentecost. The people did not begin speaking the same language, they began to understand one another’s languages. They were able to connect with their neighbors in a deeply spiritual way in the midst of diversity, not in spite of it.
Read MoreTo have life without end, for Jesus, is not something we can achieve by possessing the right set of facts, even the right set of beliefs, like some final exam of life. Instead, Jesus is inviting us into the knowledge that is a participation in God’s own self—the relationship of the Father and the Son and the Spirit in which we can become members in a life of love that been in existence from before time. To enter this knowledge, we are called to be students of Jesus, disciples who learn to enter his way of being.
Read MoreI’ve seen on social media that several Episcopal churches are celebrating the feast of the Ascension by flying kites. Clearly I’m not alone in finding a beautiful symmetry between this feast day and the story of Mary Poppins. They are both stories for all ages and all spiritual journeys. They remind us of our need to step out of our comfort zone as people of faith, and they remind us of our need to sink back into that comfort and joy when our work is done.
Read MoreThe messages of Jesus and Paul start to merge. Paul tells us that God is as close to us as the lives we lead. We live and move in God, he says. Don’t look for exterior objects to give us meaning. Moth and rust consume. And to boil down what Jesus tells us, it is in effect that when we love, we see God. God is not found in human constructs, as in which political party we support or our desire for personal ease or advancement at the expense of others. Our chosen messiahs will disappoint.
Read MoreSo on this coronation weekend, filled with all the splendor one could hope for, may we also find ourselves renewed by the Christian message. May we be reminded about community and humble service and the true King of kings.
Read MoreThe Good Shepherd discourse is divided into three sections, and we rotate through them on our three-year lectionary cycle. In this year’s section of the story, we don’t get to the part where Jesus says, “I am the Good Shepherd.” As you may have noticed, we only got as far as Jesus saying, “I am the gate for the sheep.” Of course, “Gate Sunday” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, and I don’t think a gate would be as cute stuck on a onesie, so I can understand why we stick to the Good Shepherd theme.
Read MoreEaster is God’s sermon that nothing can separate us from God, not any of our sins and not even death. The empty tomb on Easter morning is a sign of a cosmic, universe-altering event. But God’s spiritual food has also been placed where we can reach it. Easter is personal to each of us, a joyful promise that we are forever beloved by a God who refuses to let anything separate us ever again.
Read MoreOur dear friend Ragan once described the older liturgies in our tradition as coming from the attic of our faith. I love this image. I think about it every year at the Vigil. It’s as if once a year, we climb up to the attic, dust off the cobwebs, and bring down the box of our oldest and most cherished memories of the faith and sift through them together.
Read MoreIt was on this night, in a celebration of Passover, that having loved his own Jesus loved them to the end. He showed this love by breaking bread and pouring wine, signs of the death that would be his ultimate offering. It was on this night that Jesus humbled himself and washed the feet of his disciples, even the feet of his betrayer. This humble washing was a living parable, an example of the love that was to mark out his disciples in the world.
Read MoreFrom his reading of the ancient texts, he could not determine whether Zechariah’s king coming into Jerusalem was riding a donkey or its offspring. Matthew so wanted to get it right, but he could not find an easy answer. Sound familiar in our own lives? So, Matthew did something, probably not unlike what most of us would do: He put Jesus on both a donkey and its offspring. Not a very pretty solution. Go back and read the lesson carefully and compare it with the other gospellers’ accounts. Yes, according to Matthew, Jesus sat on the back of two animals as he entered Jerusalem. No absolutes, no black or white.
Read MoreI don’t know of anyone who has been resurrected , and excepting the final resurrection at the culmination of history, I assume that none of us plan to be. And yet, Lazarus is somewhat of an exemplar for us. The reality of our Christian hope is that we receive the grace of resurrection all the time. We get to start over every single day on the path towards righteousness.
Read MoreWhat if there was a way that our vision could be trained for more than what meets the normal human eye? That’s a possibility our scriptures introduce to us this morning. From Samuel learning to see as God sees to Jesus showing his disciples that there is more to the world than the systems of sin and shame, we learn that God’s vision of the world contains colors that are invisible to normal sight and yet can be seen by the light of God’s grace.
Read MoreThe people had lost faith that God was present with them in the arid, empty desert. But that same arid emptiness was all God needed to bring forth life. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating, a basic fact about our God is that where we see only death, God always offers life. There are times in our lives when this is easier to trust than others. It is good and holy when our faith does not waver. But Meribah and Massah teach us that it is also good and holy when our faith is born out of struggle and doubt.
Read MoreJohn’s gospel has layers upon layers of meaning. Human truths and divine ones merge into a universe of meaning far greater than anything we or Nicodemus ever imagined.
Read MoreShame and guilt are ideas that usually go hand in hand with penitence in the season of Lent. But Brené Brown suggests that we might need to look at repentance in a different way, and she’s not alone. Each year on Ash Wednesday we are greeted by the insuppressible faith and determination of the prophet Joel, who, as it turns out, has been speaking Brown's language all along.
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