I was in fourth grade in Lusaka, Zambia when Ms. Reedy started reading A Wrinkle in Time to our class as a reward for getting our daily work done early. I had never heard anything like it. Not only did it make me a lifetime Madeleine L’Engle fan, but it let me live with the…
Luke’s account of the Transfiguration intersected life this week, thanks to the Revised Common Lectionary, and I found a strange solace in the story I had not seen before. Sometimes, I suppose, tired eyes see new things. ____________________________ Maybe it’s just me. Or maybe it’s that we are marking the second anniversary of the full…
Part of my sermon preparation this past week was spent digging into my etymological dictionary because I like to know where words come from. I found out the Latin word from which we get our word “enemy” translates literally as “an unfriend.” That new understanding shaped how I looked at Jesus’ familiar admonition to love…
Over the past week or so my depression has made a presence of itself—life feels increasingly heavy and deflated. I can point to some circumstances that are contributors, but one of the difficult things about living with depression is it doesn’t require a cause to make itself known. The lectionary passage for this week is…
In her essay “Soon This Space Will Be Too Small,” Jordan Kisner writes, Even if we are not fated to circle a single story for our whole lives, perhaps we are obliged to follow a single thought all the way until we have finished it. Thoughts can take years. This a weekend that retells the…
Ginger and I are not good at throwing away pumpkins. We buy them every October and then just never seem to discard them as the winter wanders in. We aren’t carvers. The pumpkins sit whole doing nothing but being big and round and orange until the forces of nature that surround them take their toll….
Every so often a word enters common usage that wasn’t always there, at least in its frequency. A few years back, the word cohort started showing up. I knew what the word meant, but had never had much of a need to use it, and then all of a sudden we weren’t in groups or…
The sky is crystal clear this morning after a day of blinding snow yesterday. The ground is covered with the foot and a half of snow that fell in the midst of the storm. It is beautiful. And it is a reminder that I will get good exercise this afternoon when we start digging out…
As you probably know, we are in the middle of a Nor’easter here in New England, and one that has lived up to the hype. Weather forecasters are notorious for saying things like, “We should expect 3-18 inches of snow this weekend,” which isn’t as much a forecast as a statement that feels better than…
As someone who lives with hearing loss, depression, and two titanium knee joints, I found preaching on Paul’s metaphor of the Body of Christ (I Corinthians 12:12-31) to be multi-layered. Seeing ourselves as a body—a connected organism of relationships—is more than imagining some sort of cosmic game of Operation. Here is where the metaphor took…