Thank you so much, Laura, and everyone, for the invitation to preach this morning. It is wonderful to be here again among you. You are a special community of people, and I have missed you.
Our four wonderful lessons for today are each about faith. Oh, they concern a number of other things too, but the idea of faith unites them mightily. In Genesis we read of God’s...
I have had the privilege over the years of making a number of visits to Guatemala. It is a beautiful country of lush mountains, volcanoes, deep lakes, Mayan ruins, and most of all living Mayan cultures with twenty-two language groups and all their customs, traditions, practices. As you may know, Guatemala is perpetually trading off with Nicaragua for the dubious honor of being the second...
He had been with them for forty days - forty days since he had been executed, that is. How stunned they had been (to put it mildly) when he appeared to them after that, having risen from the dead. Forty more days he was with them, but it was nothing like the years they’d had with him before. Things were very different now. Before, there had been miracles – demons cast out of sick...
Let me begin by confessing that this story from Luke of the walk to Emmaus is one of my very favorites in all of scripture. For this reason my husband Jarrett and I chose it for the gospel reading at our wedding some years ago. It tells of the presence of Christ – the accompaniment of Christ – where we least expect him, when we don’t even know that he is there, perhaps when we...
Did you hear it in these verses – the overwhelming part of fear in the resurrection story? I’ve only recently noticed it. Did you hear it, too? Each of the four gospels’ accounts of the resurrection of Jesus has quite a lot in common, naturally: they describe the same event! But each has, in addition, a unique perspective on that event; each lifts out for emphasis particular...
It was many years ago now that a former minister of mine lost his son in a car accident. The son was in his early twenties. The pastor of course took the next Sunday off from the pulpit and drove the 150 miles to the city in which the son had lived and died. There the extended family gathered, they wept, they held the memorial service, and then had to return to their homes to try to...
Open our ears and our hearts this afternoon, O God, so that your Holy Spirit may do its work, and we may never be the same again. Amen.
What would you do if Jesus Christ himself came into the town where you live, was walking down the road – your street – and was looking for a place to rest himself and do some teaching, open up the gospels to people, answer all our...
As we all know, we are in the grip of election season. As the circus road show that is the primaries and caucuses moves from state to state, as big tents get erected the clowns come out for comic relief, donkeys and elephants parade around the ring, folks do verbal high-wire acts, tame lions (or get mauled by them!), fly through the air grasping for the next trapeze, then parade out...
A number of years ago, at the beginning of Lent, I resolved to give up chocolate. This was a very significant decision for me – I love chocolate. I have some every day, in some form. I can go to an ice cream shop that has 300 flavors and I will only ever order chocolate. Or deep chocolate. Or triple chocolate fudge brownie – whatever is the most chocolaty. During this particular...