Last Sunday, on World Communion Sunday – in his sermon – Jonathan Larson offered us a necklace of stories, a string of tales from scripture, Anabaptist history, and his own life – all examples of moments when the whisper of beloved community was heard, that as Hebrews said – “Jesus is not ashamed to call […]
Psalm
Looking Down
It’s hard to be a human. The growing pains of learning how to live in these bodies, the search for belonging and friendship, the daily need to provide food and shelter and a future for our loved ones, the questions of purpose and meaning that gnaw at us. Being a human is filled with all manner […]
Who is this king of glory?
When I heard the news of the assassination attempt at former president Trump’s rally I felt a pit in my stomach. I pray for him and his healing, for the other victims, and the shooter, and all of their families – and for all people in our neighborhoods, cities, country and world who live in […]
Search Me & Know Me
We’re all searching for something. When I ride my bike I love to search for random items strewn on the roadside. I’ve found lots of things this way. I’ve found a little pocket knife that’s now a favorite, a few nice pairs of gloves, lots of bungee cords, and sometimes cash. To a lover of […]
Beginning as Beloved
Today is the celebration of Christ’s baptism. And yesterday in the church calendar was Epiphany, remembering the three wise men from the east who journeyed to offer gifts and see the Messiah. It’s the time in the church year when we celebrate Jesus bursting onto the scene of the world’s drama – making himself known […]
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 […]
Geography of Faith
The other week, as Alli and I were caravanning out here, I listened straight through to all nine episodes of the WYNC Studios podcast “Dolly Parton’s America.” They powered me through our first day driving, all the way from Osage City, Kansas to Cookeville, Tennessee. It’s a brilliant podcast that explores Dolly Parton’s legacy as […]
The Path Ahead
This is not a typical sermon. At first it is not a sermon at all. I am going to start well off the subject, and even when it starts to sound like a sermon its purpose will not be fully apparent until the summary at the end. This congregation started without a pastor. We spent […]
With
Homemaking. The Christian life is a kind of homemaking. To make a home in this world, to make a life together, the routines and practices, the rituals and habits, where a people learn how to belong with one another—to find a home, not as property, not in a building, but instead with each other, a […]
Wounded peace
On Palm Sunday we stand at the edge of Lent, looking toward Easter. Today, with our story from Luke’s Gospel, with Jesus riding into Jerusalem, the crowds sweep us into holy week. In the story, the people line the street. The air is electric with excitement. The multitudes show up to welcome Jesus, to welcome […]
Wait
Psalm 27:14, “Wait for God; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for God.” When a bible passage repeats a phrase, that’s usually a signal to pay attention. So I thought we’d pay attention to those words. “Wait for God.” This is a Psalm about waiting. Lent is a season of waiting—we gather […]
Wild Patience
The devil quotes scripture. This book that we read from every week can be twisted. Its words can be made to serve evil purposes. That’s not a surprise to anyone, of course. We look around and see the Bible used to harm all the time. We have it in our own Anabaptist history. Let me […]
Praying
Psalm 13 (VT #728), Psalm 46:10 (VT #730), Romans 8:26 (VT #729), Philippians 4:4-7 (VT #726) As you probably noticed, all of our Bible passages for today are taken from one page of our hymnal, all on the theme of prayer. I especially like the way they linked the last three scripture passages together, with […]
Singing
Psalm 100 (VT #20), Psalm 47:1, 6-7 (VT #108), Isaiah 42:10-11 (VT #106), Revelation 7:9-12 (VT #110) I’m not very good at singing. You probably already knew that. I don’t really know how to read music, and I can’t stick with a part without help from others. So I just try to listen along, sometimes […]
Surely you know
After thirty chapters of silence, God finally speaks to Job. God answers with questions. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (38:4) “Where is the way to the dwelling of light?” (38:19) “Have you entered the storehouses of snow, or have you seen the storehouses of hail?” (Job 38:22) “Who has […]
Longing for intimacy
What I despise most about myself is my aloofness. I pull back when I should reach out. Afraid of rejection, I hide away from the friendships in which I may be truly known. Stung by some minor offense, I react with a cold shoulder. This scares me most in how I relate to my kids. […]
Food in due season
The Bible passage we heard make me hungry. They’re all about food. Psalm 145:15, “We look to you, O God, and you give us food in due season.” In 2 Kings 4 we have a very short story about people having enough to eat during a famine: they share barely loaves and freshly harvested grain. […]
Woe to the shepherds
“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the LORD” (Jeremiah 23:1) Jeremiah prophesies God’s condemnation of leaders who forsake their people, shepherds who neglect the flock. The leaders have consolidated their authority with terror, and have driven away the people with abusive power. They manipulate the needs of […]
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 […]
“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.
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.
Relentless love
The story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, this week of all weeks, lends itself to a bewildering variety of readings, most of them bereft of good news. Here’s the Sunday school version of the story—call it Joseph’s Righteous Prosperity. Joseph does what is right and so God blesses him, increases his power, his possessions, his […]
Our feathered refuge
“They say of the Lord…” For all the strange formality of Scripture, all the Thees and Thous, all the mystifying stories, all the water-into-wine miracles and genocides and talk about the Son of God, there are times when the Bible makes me laugh with its plainspoken, downright folksiness, and this is what caught my eye […]