table talk we sat around tables in the church basement we call fellowship hall sharing a potluck supper that turned out to be an abundance of bread on the table were sheets holding definitions of theologies of communion our topic for the night we read the paragraphs and then we told stories sharing a meal…
I chose a passage today that doesn’t make the Lectionary but has a lot to say in these days. These three verses from Luke hold two parables that say a lot in three sentences. _________________________ One of the things I like about our ecumenical Ash Wednesday service are the mini homilies each of the pastors…
time piece some time in the night we will rob ourselves of an hour of sleep so that we can save daylight making some vague promise that the hour saved will be kept safely and returned in the fall a story that only works if we are looking at our wrists rather than the heavens…
liminality how can two months ago feel like history? what was is long gone what’s next is not yet here our country is falling apart like a poorly built rocket we are left to wait and hurt and not know what comes next but something’s coming the way things are is not sustainable arrogance and…
“And, when all else fails, we sing ourselves sane.” — Barbara Holmes One of the things I’ve come to believe after nine years in Connecticut is the people who built the roads in this state never imagined that people would want to go from east to west. They made it fairly easy to get from…
Ash Wednesday is a busy day in the life of a part-time pastor, and by that I mean I worked a full day. My morning at work started with talking to a woman whom I met when we invited a local dog shelter to share in our Blessing of the Animals. Actually, I met with…
I veered away from the Lectionary passage this week because I was captured by the story in Luke 7:1-10, which is about, well, stories. ______________________ One of the things I like about living in Guilford is being able to shop at Forte’s Market, mainly because they have a real butcher counter where they grind the…
I know I wasn’t the only one who struggled with what to say in my sermon today. I chose the passage a few weeks back—Luke 6:39-49—and it gave me a good jumping off place this morning. As I prepared the sermon, I kept thinking about words from King Lear I first learned reading Frederick Buechner:…
imago d.e.i. can we talk numbers? 91 different kinds of antelope 11,000 different birds 50,000 spiders 34,000 snakes 30,000 fish and too many worms to try and count not to mention us we humans are one of 522 different primates but perhaps the only ones who see themselves as the image of God which begs…
I’m working my way through Luke so I am a little off from the lectionary, but this turned out to be the right story for this past week and, perhaps, for the days to come. _________________________ In my days as a high school English teacher, one of the books I loved to read with my…