Sermons

Three is a magic number. Schoolhouse Rock told me so. And the mystery of the Trinity is embedded as the code in everything that exists. That is according to Father Richard Rohr, OFM, a Franciscan of the New Mexico province, ordained in 1970 – three years after my birth and three years before the first episode of Schoolhouse Rock aired. The debut episode that informed viewers that “three is a magic number.”Continue Reading

Here’s your sign. Bill Engvall, a comedian who was part of the “Blue Collar Comedy Tour,” has a routine about having signs to identify certain people. “Moving van in the driveway, boxes all over the walk, neighbor says: ‘Y’all moving?’ ‘No – we just thought it’d be fun to pack everything up to see what it looked like. Here’s your sign.’ ” In other words: That was a really stupid question, because the scene makes the answer obvious.Continue Reading

It’s on the Blue album. Which I owned in college, because didn’t everyone. To be honest, when it came to today’s message, I had to go look up the chronology. This would be the Beatles nonsense song “I Am the Walrus,” loosely inspired by “Jabberwocky,” a poem by Lewis Carroll.Continue Reading

Along the way, along the journey from the Festival of the Resurrection to the Festival of the Pentecost, you and I are being invited to so much richness. This is truly what Isaiah the prophet calls “a feast of fat things.” Present company (perhaps) excepted.Continue Reading

In the 1970s, a popular feature in newspapers, usually on the comics pages, was a one-panel illustration. “Love is.” Each illustration showed a man and woman, as in the Garden of Eden. Each one had the words, “Love is . . .” at the top and a few words at the bottom. “Love is living in hope.” “Love is something you need on life’s journey.” “Love is not ordering the most expensive dish on the menu.”Continue Reading

Action to Get

Well, get up! There’s stuff to do. Action to get!
In his 1994 novel The Alienist, Caleb Carr shows us the New York City of 1896, when the brand-new Commissioner of Police is a wealthy, college-educated local named Theodore Roosevelt.
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John 20:19-23 (24-29  When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said “Peace be with you.”  After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side.  Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.  Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you.  As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them.  “Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”Continue Reading

Nothing is the same forever, or so says modern science. That is, 98 percent of our bodies’ atoms get replaced every year. Resurrection is another word for change, particularly for a certain kind of change: positive change that we are able to observe, to know it for what it is, only in the long run. In the short run, change often looks like death.Continue Reading

So many times we preach Easter as the end of the journey, when here we are at the first steps of a journey that is just beginning.

When you and I walk with someone whose loved one has just died, we say, and they say, “He’s in a better place.” “He’s out of pain.” And it comforts us in our grief. But the death of a loved one, no matter how much you and I believe in what comes next, hurts like nothing else. It is brutally raw. It is white-hot fire and hypothermic ice all at once. For those who walked Jesus, knew Jesus, loved Jesus, the un-anesthetized pain of having watched him die did not go away. Jesus was resurrected, real, and not a ghost – but he was not the same Teacher they had walked with, broken bread with, and listened to.Continue Reading

“The pause that refreshes.” Does anyone remember that slogan for Coca-Cola? Anthropologists, who study people and culture, have a word for that pause that refreshes: Liminality. It’s the point at which the person on a journey, often through a rite of passage, is no longer who they were before, but not yet fully whom they will be. For your average Lutheran, this might be described as confirmation, only with most cultures it typically involves less pizza.Continue Reading