Wine, Power, and Keeping your Head
The stories of John and Jesus overlap repeatedly. Both have unusual conceptions. Both grow up to be truth tellers who disturb the peace. Both threaten the powers that be and pay for it with their...
Only Believe
There have been times in my life I have been suffering and I would surely have loved one of Jesus’ miracles. There are times I have sat helplessly next to people who are suffering and...
Challenging God
I can relate to the disciples who were terrified—in an out of control situation—and there is Jesus, snoring away—sleeping as if he didn’t have a care in the world. I would be right with them...
Life After Paradise
Stories are how we make sense of the world, how we build meaning. Stories help us place ourselves in the sweep of history—help us identify our people and see how they lived. They help us...
God of Love, Prince of Peace
I’m going to go a little rogue today and preach on texts that we didn’t hear, because today, a day focusing on gun violence, I want to preach about violence and about Jesus’ death—a story...
A Prayer to be Burned Up and Blown Away by the Holy Spirit
If ever there was a moment we needed Pentecost, needed this particular communion creating work of the Spirit, it is now. Division, hatred, rancor, pain, and injustice haunt our nation. Our political discourse is poisonous....
Nothing to Stop Us
It is hard to know how to talk to outsiders. Hard to approach them, the ones whose lives, beliefs are very different than our own.
God’s Latest Resurrection
Though it seems that many Western Christians are obsessed with believing the “right” things, “saying the right formula”, I am not so sure God cares what we say–cares if we have all our doctrines right....
A Disappointing God
This is not new—God consistently disappoints us—mostly because, at heart, we are more interested in what we want God to be than in who God is. We do a marvelous job of projecting our own...
Local Wheat Fields
One of the persistent questions of Christianity has to do with the meaning of the death of Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus, Son of God. A common question, though maybe not among Episcopalians, is “do you...