“I am content with weaknesses… for whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:10). I have a lot of weaknesses. Spiritual, emotional, physical, relational. A very long list. And I’m sure I’ve got more of them than I know of, others that I haven’t noticed. The weakness on my mind this week […]
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Steadfast mercy
“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; God’s mercies never come to an end.” ~ Lamentations 3:22 I remember a crush I had one year in high school. I don’t think we were quite dating, per se. We never had a DTR, one of those conversations to “define the relationship.” But we were together […]
Words without knowledge
“Who is this who darkens my counsel with words without knowledge?” (Job 38:2) That line jumped off the page for me this week, after two months of not having to preach, and now having to stand here and have something to say. I heard the verse as a caution, that speaking, that saying things here […]
Covid 4: Easter
It was still dark when Mary Magdalene came to the tomb. If you read the resurrection accounts in Matthew, Mark, or Luke you’ll hear that a group of women came at dawn, or just after the sun had risen. But in John’s account Mary goes to the tomb alone. And she goes when it still […]
Covid 3: Holy Week
Today’s gospel reading begins as Jesus arrives in a village near Jerusalem. He’s giving personal directions to two of his disciples. They should bring him an unknown person’s livestock, he says. Don’t worry, he’ll return them right away. Weird, but ok, teacher. The passage ends with the voice of the crowd, as anonymous as the […]
Covid 2: We wait
Our passage from Ezekiel opens with a vision, where the prophet is standing in the middle of a valley.He’s in the valley of the shadow of death, that place we heard about last week in Psalm 23. Here, in this vision, God takes Ezekiel to a place of despair, where it looks like all hope […]
Covid 1: With me
The prophet Samuel has gone through a lot at this point in the story. If we rewind a bit, he first told the people that a king would be a bad idea. They didn’t need a king, he said. A king would abuse power. But they got a king anyway, and Samuel anointed him—that was […]
Brilliant Memory
I am not sure if the sermon below is a sermon at all, sent as it is from my isolation to yours: not preached but written, not heard but read. There is no communal response, no chance to affirm or disaffirm that the gospel has been preached. CHMF sermons open themselves up to the conversation; […]
Son of Man, Sophia of God
No lyric has ever stopped a tank. No sermon has ever ended patriarchy, especially a sermon delivered by a man. But here we are, trying again, with some words about a few Scriptures—an invitation to live into new possibilities, a call for change. Because we are in need of reformation, we are in church always in need of reformation, to be renewed and restored. To be healed from the sexism that has plagued the church, that plagues our society, that infects our lives, our relationships.
Wisdom, creator of all things
Wisdom is the architect of all things, the builder of the world, the one who formed creation. That’s how the passage from the Wisdom of Solomon describes this cosmic person, this divine personality, all-powerful and full of benevolence. She pervades and penetrates all things, it says, she is God’s power, the breath of God. In […]
The God Who Works
At the end of our Isaiah passage, God declares the shortcomings of all metaphors: “For I am god and there is no other, I am God, and there is nothing like me.” We are talking about gender and God – how is God like a man, how is God like a woman, what are God’s […]
The God Who Gave You Birth
Well, I’ll be honest. I’m not a patient person at all, and although for some odd reason I enjoy philosophy, I’ve never had much patience for thinking about gender or theology. Gender is at once too simple and too complicated for me to dwell on. Maybe it’s too hurtful. Theology feels like navel gazing or […]
God of our ancestors
In our passage from Exodus, when Moses talks with the burning bush, he asks the fire about its identity, about how to tell others about who this is, what kind of deity could this be. “The God of your ancestors”—that who this is, the voice says to Moses. This weeks begins our two-month series on […]
Epiphanies
The magi see signs in the night sky, celestial revelations, announcing that the long-awaited Jewish king, the Messiah, has been born, and they want to pay their respects. After traveling for months across the desert, the magi, probably from Persia, finally arrive in Jerusalem. Jerusalem because, after all, that’s the kind of place where kings […]
Immanuel
This isn’t just the story of Christmas,
just something we hear during this season,
as we reflect on a few passages;
but the story of the bible, the whole thing, is one long story
of a God who has always been finding ways to be with us,
to draw close to us,
to struggle with us,
to rest with us,
because God likes us.
A new heavens and a new earth
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth…and there was no more sea,” no more chaos and difficulty… “See, God’s home is among the people” (Rev 21: 1, 3). It is a vision of heaven. God literally brings heaven out of the sky and sets up house. It is a vision of God’s ultimate homecoming for us, and for God.
“Do not fear, O Soil”
In this passage from the book of Joel, we hear God speaking, not to human beings, but to soil and animals. We get to eavesdrop on their conversation, to listen to the sorts of things they talk about, God and the soil, God and the animals, when they chat.
Exiles in prison
If we’re committed to the welfare of this country, to the people around us, to the people exiled from us in prisons, in detention centers—if we find our welfare in their welfare, how do we make sense of the contradictions? The contradiction that to be for the welfare of prisoners involves being against the welfare of the society that builds prisons, a way of life that depends on incarceration. What does it mean for us to be committed to peace, here, in this place where God has put us, when sinister violences hold it all together?
Not Forgetting
Growing up, I would at different times ask my mom, “what was the best time of your life?” I asked her this question repeatedly, year after year, I suppose always waiting to hear something different. Every single time, she’d reply, “well, my life is pretty good right now.” I just knew though, that there had to be another answer—I figured that the best time of her life had to be when she was a smooth-skinned twenty year old, her potential yet unhampered by kids and the weight of domesticity. Or maybe it was another time. Whatever the case, the best time of her life couldn’t be right then—why would it be? She always seemed to be eluding the question by not telling me about a time that lived on, resplendent in her memory, as the BEST time of her life.
The potter’s wheel
Repentance is how we say yes to God’s vision for our lives—to let go of all the ways we try to be something we are not, to release our grip on visions for life that aren’t good for us, visions that aren’t good for our neighbors, and instead entrust ourselves into God’s care, to trust that God will remake us and our world with the goodness we need. Jeremiah’s prophecy about the potter’s house is a word of judgment, a call to say no to what causes destruction in our lives and in our communities, in order to say yes to God’s goodness, to say yes to God’s grace.
to plant
There’s a tree in my backyard, actually a neighbor’s yard, but it’s branches reach above our house, a canopy of leaves over our backyard. A month ago there was a tree guy doing work on it, cutting away a dead branch that stretched toward our house. I asked him how old he thought the tree was. At least 150 years, he said. I stared at it from my backyard office for the rest of the day, thinking about what it’s seen. In it’s early years, it would have watched as Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation set enslaved people free, free from their Southern masters. Maybe the tree was planted in celebration of that liberation. An oak tree bearing witness to the end of slavery.
Let us argue
This stuff weights me down—for you it could be the situation in Kashmir or all the ice melting in Alaska’s seas, or all of this and more. I feel it in my shoulders, the tightness in my neck. Each body carries weight that pulls at us in different ways. I’ve named public trauma here, but I know each of us, each of you, have very personal traumas and heartaches, intimate anxieties that mess with your head, that affect your day to day life.
The earth shall answer
The Scriptures aren’t so much worried about the salvation of this person or that person, but in a collective future for the people as a whole. God saves a community, a people, God’s people, not just individuals, which means each person’s fate is bound up with all the others, my salvation is bound up with yours, and yours with mine.
Prophecies of exile
Here’s the thing I learned from Amos this week, after reading through his prophecy. There’s so little concern with all the things I’ve obsessed about, as a Christian, for most of my life. God doesn’t waste time with the stuff I’ve always thought about as so important for my life, for my faith—all my conceptions about faithfulness, about what it means to love God, to live according to God’s will.