For all but the last few days of Advent the days keep growing shorter. I find myself getting up early so I don’t miss any daylight. Our schnauzers have learned to come find me around four o’clock so we can walk the green as the sun sets; if I am in the house, sometimes I…
For many years I have written daily during Advent. For the first time in a long time I will be preaching through Advent as well. My sermon for this first Sunday is “We Will Get Through This,” drawing from Isaiah 64:1-9. ______________________________ Somehow it is the first Sunday in Advent and we are on the…
My cousin Sloane is in the hospital tonight in Houston with COVID pneumonia. Though we are cousins, we have never had the luxury of living near each other but, particularly in our adult lives, have found ways to feel like family. She sent me a text tonight to let me know she had been hospitalized…
This week’s sermon wraps up three weeks in Matthew 25 with another perplexing parable. I am thankful to Netflix for providing illustrative material, and to Ginger and Kenny for bouncing around ideas. Here’s where I landed. ______________________ I read an article in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago written by a book…
One of Guy Clark’s lyrics says, “Somedays you write the song, somedays the song writes you.” I had a good idea for my sermon on Matthew 25:14-30 but struggled to find an ending and a title, which makes sense; the two often go together for me. I ended up asking, “What’s the story?” and found…
Sometimes I cook things because I really want to cook something and I go get the ingredients I need. At other times, I come across ingredients and then figure out what to cook with them. This recipe falls into the second category, which is more fun for me in many ways because it is more…
It’s been years since I watched television news for more than a few minutes. This week I caught up, staying up late, waiting to see what was going to happen in these unprecedented days. Somehow, in the middle of it all, I managed to get a sermon written. Here’s what I had to say. _____________________________…
I can’t remember now who I read or heard say the phrase “saints of diminished capacity” (I thought it was Nadia Bolz-Weber, then today I found this book.), but it has stuck with me, and has been a poem I keep coming back and revising. Here is the 2020 version: saints of diminished capacity the…
Name ______________________________ 1. A word for when you’re not sure of the way out. 2. A word for losing track of time. 3. A word for the hunger for human touch. 4. A word for living through your anxieties and still feeling anxious. 5. A word for a consistent lack of adequate vocabulary. 6. A…
On this Election Eve, I spent some time in my record collection looking for songs to carry me over the next few days. Many are songs that have carried me for years. I hope they offer some solace and solidarity as we ponder the fate of our nation. For many reasons, I wish “America” was…