While We Wait
Waiting is the hardest thing to do because it feels like you’re not doing anything. And it seems twice as hard when you’re young. When we’re children, Christmas always seems eons away and we think the end of school or our birthday will never arrive.Continue Reading
John the king of England had issues. He had always been deeply jealous of his older brother, known as King Richard the Lion-hearted. When Richard was killed during one of the Crusades, John was already in trouble for being unfaithful to his wife. John’s wife could have no children, and John was not only having an affair, he was having one with a woman from France, England’s sworn enemy. Continue Reading
She has nothing. At least nothing that anybody else would value. At forty-seven years old, she is unmarried and still lives at home. Because of a little oxygen deprivation at birth, she is not quite as sharp mentally, not quite as quick, as most people. Her face is friendly and open, and she is cheerfully self-deprecating, but no one would call her conventionally pretty. When we see her for the first time, she is tall and solidly built, with frizzy dark hair, and wearing a gold lame dress with, oddly, dark stockings and open-toed high-heeled shoes. In response to someone rolling his eyes when he hears that she’s almost fifty years old, she makes a joke. “And that’s just one side of me,” she says, and wiggles her hips. Everyone is laughing at her.Continue Reading
Something has to change. Something. Has. To. Change.
Have you ever thought that? Have you ever felt that in your life?Continue Reading
The question is the same in every age: how are we to navigate the waters of life? How do we get from the start of the river of life to its end without swamping the canoe, turning the canoe over, or crashing the thing into the bank? You and I and all of us seem to be searching, constantly, for a reliable way to walk alongside life’s challenges and uncertainties and difficulties. We want to know that our lives have some meaning. We want reassurance that our existence is connected to something much larger than ourselves.Continue Reading
This day, on which we celebrate the reformation of the church, is not quite arbitrary. It marks the date in the year 1517 on which Martin Luther, a monk and professor of theology, opened an invitation to debate over the question of paying for forgiveness. In short, the day on which he nailed to the church door his Ninety-five Theses, insisting that grace is a gift from God, one that cannot be earned, and one that comes from God alone.Continue Reading
It’s a trap.
As we continue to walk with Jesus through the last week of his life in the Gospel of Matthew, we continue to see the authorities try to trick him and trap him. They want to make him say something that will allow them to arrest him, to take him into custody, to get him off the streets.Continue Reading
When Nora Gallagher, a writer who lives in Northern California, was in the process of discernment, pondering whether she was being called to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church, her priest sent her a card with a picture of a shepherd carrying a child, captioned, “Get off my back, Jesus.” Inside, echoing an idea from a poem, he wrote: “Is the Hound of Heaven hounding you?”Continue Reading
Crazy Stupid Love
We have here the third response to the temple leadership’s question about the origins of Jesus’ authority for his actions in the temple.
In last week’s Gospel, Jesus counters with a question about the authority of John’s baptism. That’s one response. Jesus then tells the parable of the two sons and their obedience. That gives us the second response from the temple leadership.Continue Reading
The context of this story is important. Jesus has just made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, riding in on a donkey and being hailed by the crowds as the Son of David, the fulfilment of their hopes and prophecies and dreams.
Immediately after that, Jesus went into the Temple and overturned the tables of the traders, claiming that space back for God. As a result, in verse 14, he continues a ministry of healing; showing that he has authority not just over the crowds and the religious institutions but authority over nature itself.Continue Reading