Moses comes down from the mountain, Mount Sinai, where he’s been meeting with God, where God has been revealed to Moses, where God has spoken to and with Moses. Moses comes down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant, containing the Ten Commandments. This is the second time this has happened. The […]
You probably noticed that I read a bit more of the Gospel of Luke today than what was printed in the bulletin. That’s because of the blizzard last week. I read some of what we would have heard last week to set the stage for our Gospel reading today. It’s important to understand what’s going […]
There are lots of days of commemoration on the Christian calendar – days on which we remember saints of God who have had an impact on the life of the Church and for the good of the world. There are relatively few that are also marked and kept as holidays in the culture at large. […]
[Click HERE for video] Today is the Feast of The Baptism of Our Lord, a day on which we reflect on the meaning of Jesus of Nazareth’s baptism in the Jordan River by his cousin John the Baptist. It’s also a day on which, at the beginning of today’s service, we have already witnessed […]
On this 10th day of Christmas – this second Sunday of Christmas – we continue to keep the 12 day feast of the Incarnation. God has come in real human flesh as the babe of Bethlehem, and by this coming has hallowed all human flesh! God has come, born to displaced and oppressed […]
[Click here for video] I was born in the 1960s, and so I was approaching my teen years when the Vietnam war ended. Shortly thereafter, the Iran hostage situation happened, and the Marine barracks in Beirut were attacked, and we invaded Grenada, and, while Karen and I were on our honeymoon, in April, 1986, we […]
[Click here for video] There seems to be a very clear difference between our reading from Philippians and our Gospel reading for today. Paul and John the Baptist seem to have very different understandings of and very different ways of proclaiming what the coming of the Lord means, not that one’s better than the other, […]
We began our keeping of Advent last week thinking about God’s faithfulness, about how God keeps God’s covenant promises, even when things seem to spin out of control at times in our lives and in our world. We also considered what our response ought to look like at such times, as those who are named […]
Sometimes I wonder about the folks who put our lectionary (the 3-year series of appointed readings that we use in worship) together, and what they were thinking when they decided what to include and what to cut, where to start and where to end our readings from week to week. It must have been a […]
[Click here for video] In a letter written to his dear friend, Eberhard Berthge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from his Nazi prison cell, says: God is the beyond in the midst of our lives. (Letters and Papers from Prison. April 30, 1944) The beyond in the midst of our lives is an intriguing way to […]