In the Eastern Orthodox tradition of iconography – supposedly one of the first icons that every monk-painter must paint at the start of their apprenticeship is the vision of the Christ, transfigured and shining on the mountaintop with Moses and Elijah, and the stunned disciples nearby. Of all the biblical scenes that could be chosen […]
Exodus
A Call to Action
Prayer: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” In an earlier sermon I opened with a few comments about the Lectionary, and do so again. Today it lists three scripture passages that are hard to ignore. Who can brush aside […]
Thirst for Freedom
The Israelites are thirsty and water is nowhere to be seen. This freedom journey out of Egypt into the wilderness has been the Lord’s idea, a trip where God has made the itinerary. And now the people of Israel find themselves camped at Rephidim with no water to drink. That’s like the first rule […]
Hunger for Freedom
Some of the prayers we know best are mealtime prayers. They are prayers which we may have learned as children and they are prayers simple enough to invite us to be children again as we pray them. As I sat with the Exodus 16 text this week – where God gives bread in the wilderness […]
Fight for Freedom
Hands are amazing. They can do so many things. They’re delicate enough to sew tiny stitches with a needle or wipe away a kid’s tears yet strong enough to hoist and hold and comfort. With our hands we can coax music out of guitar strings or piano keys and we can knead dough and we […]
Time for Freedom
Clearly, it’s time for freedom. It’s high time for freedom. The time’s up on injustice. It is time for freedom. After more than four hundred years in the bondage of slavery in Egypt, the people of Israel see a way out. And our text from Exodus 12 drops us right into the middle of one […]
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 […]
No gods but God
This week, in the narrative lectionary, we journey into Exodus. In the early chapters of the book, through Moses, God liberates Israel from slavery in Egypt, leading them out of captivity and on to Mount Sinai in a pillar of fire. In today’s scripture passage, from Exodus 19 and 20, God establishes a covenant with […]
Coveting
I covet. I covet another world. Not this one. I covet. I covet another life. Not mine. We desire, we want, and we dream—we covet worlds not ours and lives different from our own. Yet the last commandment, the tenth, the culmination of all the others, says, “Thou shall not covet.” I break that commandment […]
Me too
Masculinity and violence are so closely tied we barely pause to question it. And if I am reading Jesus right here, the commandment “You shall not murder” is about this entire spectrum of violence.
Vigilance of wonder
Life is full of joy; life is full of heartache. The world overflows with wonder; the world overflows with anguish. There’s so much agony, and there’s so much love. It’s a whirlwind—this life. I’m sure you have your own desolations and ecstasies. I have my own, too. And this is what I wonder to myself—and […]
Princesita Gómez Gonzáles
Coming and going, leaving and arriving, exit and entrance. That’s the theme lying underneath our passages for today. That’s the theme permeating the verses we heard from Matthew and Exodus. Departures and arrivals—the movement of people. Follow the commandments, Jesus says in Matthew 5, so you can enter the kingdom of heaven—it’s all about a […]
The burden of care
When I looked over the scriptures for this week in preparation to preach, I found that the Exodus passage and the Luke passage presented an astonishing juxtaposition. The Exodus scene has God downright disgusted by the Israelites he led into the wilderness. The Israelites, perhaps out of impatience and boredom, created a golden calf to […]