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…
Every three years in the lectionary cycle, the story of the wedding at Cana (John 2:1-12) is the suggested passage for the Sunday before the MLK holiday. Since neither the gospel writers nor the lectionary committee knew anything about the King commemoration, many churches turn to King’s words in their worship. This year, as I…
One of the characteristics of recipe blogs, as opposed to a recipe site, is that you generally have to read through a long story to get to the recipe, so if you are trying to find a recipe in a hurry, you have to scroll for a while to find what you want. But the…
Since we don’t have a service on January 6, I traveled with the magi today for my sermon, a passage I have looked at many times because it often comes up the Sunday after Christmas—a Sunday I often preach. Though my “go to” sermon is about learning how to go home by another way (thanks…
Many years ago, Ginger asked me to write a story for Christmas Eve. I wrote something called “A Faraway Christmas,” which has made an appearance on this blog a number of times. Last year, when I was the bridge pastor for United Churches of Durham, Connecticut and we couldn’t meet in person, I recorded an…
alleluia advent this year feels more like a season of endurance than expectation as though ‘we made it’ might be a legitimate translation of alleluia in these days of distance the road to the manger seems in desperate need of repair who could believe that Christ could be born on a night like this the…