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…
Over a decade ago–August 2009, to be exact–I sat down to write my post for the day and began this way: Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon today, I found what I thought would be the opening lines to a poem for my post: when they ask how you’re doing say something other than…
I think I was working on my Masters in English when I first learned of bell hooks, noticing first that she chose not to use capital letters in her name. The English department at UMass Boston was full of professors who were intent on introducing us to people who changed the way we thought about…
time piece The Long Island Sound faces south so even though I’m on the East Coast I can see sunrise and sunset over the water today they were only nine hours apart that’s all the daylight we got come back six months from now and that stretches to fifteen hours the days in between rocking…
When I last posted on December 8, it was not my intent to wait eleven days before I wrote again. The last couple of weeks have been a symphony of emotions from my sixty-fifth birthday to a health scare for one of our chosen family. I tried to get here, but it seems like I…