advent journal: eyewitness in my quest to counter the gathering gloom as the nights grow longer and the daylight disappears I have made a point of being up everyday before sunrise to see the dawn break right before my eyes to try and counter the inevitable arrival of my autumnal depression it’s less about daylight…
As I begin another year of writing each day during Advent, beginning with the sermon I preached this morning seems right. It is where the season is starting for me: in the shared space of life in my congregation. I am not following the lectionary this week and took Isaiah 35:1-10 as the jumping off…
Though the history of our Thanksgiving holiday is complicated and layered, observing a Sunday of Thanks feels worthy in any season. Here is my sermon this week. May we all find reasons for gratitude in the midst of everything. ___________________________ I ran into my friends Becky and Dave while I was grocery shopping yesterday. Becky…
This week I preached on a passage that never shows up in the lectionary cycle: the parable Jesus told right after his encounter with Zacchaeus. It is not an easy story to digest, but it felt worth talking about. _______________________ If you were to pick up a poetry anthology for a high school or college…
This week’s sermon continues working through the end of Luke’s gospel, as the lectionary year draws to a close, finding Zacchaeus by the shore of the Great Salt Lake. ______________________ On our recent whirlwind trip to Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho, Ginger and I were reading about the Great Salt Lake and I learned a term…
Here is my sermon for All Saints Sunday, based on Luke’s version of Jesus’ beatitudes and woes. ______________________________ Years ago, I was a member of a wonderful church in Dallas called Royal Lane Baptist Church. They, like many Baptist churches, had a tradition of a Wednesday night meal and prayer service. On most Wednesdays, we…
My sermon on Jesus’ parable of the pharisee and the tax collector hinges on a re-translation by Amy-Jill Levine that opened up the story for me. __________________________ In the early days of Saturday Night Live, one of the repeating characters was a priest named Father Guido Sarducci. He was not a priest of course, but…
My sermon this week is from a parable of Jesus often called “The Persistent Widow.” It is not one of my favorites but seemed worth wrestling with. What I found is the title shares the story short. There’s a lot going on in the parable worth talking about. _____________________________ I grew up in a family…
We almost had a show-and-tell sermon this morning. I seriously thought about bringing Elena, one of our Schnauzer rescue pups. We have had her almost two years, though we got her thinking it was a hospice situation and she would only be with us for a couple of months. We were going to be her…
It’s getting down to crunch time in the baseball season, which means it doesn’t take much for my sermon to intersect with the Red Sox. Here’s what I said on Sunday. ________________________________ In the fall of 2004, I was the Associate Pastor of the First Congregational Church of Hanover, Massachusetts, which is about halfway between…