Healing broken bones is a pretty concrete way of helping to usher in God’s dream. And of course, Steno tended to more than just broken bones. He had a way of ministering to broken hearts, too. Like Luke the physician, he knew the link between the healing arts and Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Read MoreThis morning we’re back in the thick of it with Matthew’s Gospel. At the beginning of today’s chapter, Jesus made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. As the crucifixion draws closer, the stakes get higher, and the teachings and proclamations more urgent. With the parable of the wicked tenants, I think Jesus wanted his listeners to squirm a bit, and I think he succeeds, even to this day.
Read MoreGod is not just liberating Israel from Egypt, but is also liberating them from the entire pattern of life that Egypt represents. So, to offer a new pattern, one that doesn’t depend on controlling people and exploiting the world, God offers them a strange food, one that can’t be identified according to any of their old ways of knowing or stored up for more than a day’s time.
Read MoreThe only exception to grace seems to come when we reject a system that keeps bringing people back into the fold. If this were an easy teaching, Jesus could have said it once and been done with it. Instead he told story after story to help us heal from the pain of our endless scorekeeping.
Read MoreIt is a comfort, on this most joyful day, to know that even as we move through the messy, beautiful, hard work of being in community, we need not fear surprise or disagreement or conflict. Because we have a way forward. We have a little encouraging push from Paul to get to work. We have all kinds of guidelines for how to love each other, and we even have some steps for reconciliation when we need them. Most of all, we have our worship to ground us in the faith and keep us from forgetting to whom we belong: to God and to one another. So this fall, as we do every fall, we recommit to this place, to each other, and to our common worship. There’s no better time.
Read MoreThe first part of the passage tells us that the disciples were out on the water in a storm not by chance, but because Jesus had instructed them to do so. At first, this might be a little disconcerting. Why would Jesus send the disciples out onto the water if he knew or even suspected a storm might come? But when we take a step back, we can see this story is actually part of a larger pattern that spans all of holy scripture.
Read MoreIn a world that offers virtual, shiny, and shallow solutions to our cravings, we need to be reminded to hunger after the real and the holy.
Read MoreIt is in my inability to speak, the weakness of my words, the seeming failure of my prayers, that the Spirit moves into my heart, hearing its hope and grief, and offering my deepest self to God. The Spirit shares in the loss of words, speaking only in sighs, and yet the Spirit’s groaning on our behalf is understood by God. When we no longer know what to say, the gate to our deepest prayers is opened.
Read MoreThe parable of the wheat and the weeds is about the coexistence of good and evil in the world and in our own hearts. That’s not a surprise to any of us. But the twist comes in what Jesus asks us to do about it.
Read MoreI hope we can cut our rascal Jacob a little slack as he goes about God’s scandalous work in the world, while also having some compassion for Esau as well. We embody both of their legacies. Sometimes we are the lowly with whom God walks and sometimes we take our privilege for granted and learn a brutal lesson about quick fixes and the promise of God.
Read MoreOne of the attributes of God throughout the scriptures is that God is faithful. God chose a covenant as a means to express that divine fidelity to us. This arrangement also tells us that God’s purposes can be accomplished through our lives, no matter how imperfect the details. I think this is why Genesis zooms in on the lives of Isaac and Rebekah and so many others. If they can be the carriers of the covenant, so can we.
Read MoreWe 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.
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