For David Abner

Today’s service is a little bit different from what we would normally do on the Second Sunday in Lent. As you know, this week our parishioner David Abner died after a stay in hospice. David’s children preferred not to have a formal funeral for their...

Divine Disarmament

The story of the rainbow is a curious reading for the first Sunday in Lent. We are at the beginning of the most somber season of the church year, a time set aside for reflection and repentance, for fasting and self-denial. We began the service today with the Great...

A Lenten Prayer

Today is the last Sunday of the season of Epiphany, those weeks between Christmas and the beginning of Lent.   Epiphany ends every year with the reading we heard today, the story of the Transfiguration – the ultimate mountaintop experience where Jesus meets...

Have You Not Known?

Today’s reading from the prophet Isaiah finds the people of Israel in deep despair, wondering if they’ve been abandoned by God. The land that God promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the land that God led them to after freeing them from slavery in Egypt;...

A Loose-Leafed Faith

When I was in college someone gave me a button that I probably still have in a drawer somewhere. “Question Authority” it boldly proclaims. “Question authority” was a philosophy that suited a journalism student well. In fact, I spent my college years, and many years...

The God Who Can’t Be Trusted

Our Old Testament reading opens today with the prophet Jonah on a beach in the Mediterranean.  This is no beach vacation. Jonah looks stunned and confused. You would, too, if you had just spent three days in the belly of a giant fish, then were spewed out onto...

Love’s Redemptive Power

Have you ever wondered how the Bible came into being? Who wrote the many different books that we consider scripture, and who decided what to include in the official Bible and what to leave out? There is no clear-cut answer to those questions. With a few exceptions,...

Christmas in the Ruins

It is good to be gathered here with you on this beautiful night, the night that we celebrate the birth of a baby who will change the world. Everything about this evening is special – the music that our choirs have practiced for so many hours; the beautiful flowers and...

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