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Category Archives: lectionary reflection
Prophets and privateers: by their fruits shall ye know them
There is a hardness to the grapes, and a waxiness to the skin of the pear. There is sawdust at the bottom of the bowl, instead of the dusting of peach fuzz that we expected to find. We have been fooled. The fruit is a fake. It is plastic and wood, made only to decorate the room. It is not even a still life. There is no nurture or nutrition in it. It is lifeless. It is a scam. Continue reading
Do good. Don’t stop.
The seventy returned to Jesus excited and amped up, saying, “You should see how we owned the forces of evil! How we slayed in the name of the Spirit! We are on fire!” And Jesus said, “Yesss. Awesome. You are amazing. You are undefeatable. I know, I know that the way of love wins (because, ahem, I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life). I know that you have it in you to do great things. But, not to rain on your parade or anything, but … Do not become distracted, even by your own indisputable awesomeness, from the way of love.” Continue reading
Pentecost 2019: Come, Holy Spirit
The Spirit has been present since before the birth of creation, brooding over the waters of the uncreated deep. She breathed life into the nostrils of the first human animals, according to the old stories. She has never been far from us. The trick is to catch sight of the movement of her wings, to hear the vibrations that she creates, the rush of air, the breath of heaven. Continue reading
Posted in holy days, lectionary reflection, prayer, sermon
Tagged Holy Spirit, Pentecost
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Take up your mat
Jesus does not help the man to get to the water. Jesus does not need to buy into the system that has kept this man down for thirty-eight years. Jesus is the living water, and he has power to heal the man, and he does that; but he does more. He tells the man to take up his mat, and walk home. Continue reading
Posted in lectionary reflection, sermon
Tagged healing, Jesus, John 5:1-9, Revelation 21:10-22:5, sabbath, Year C Easter 6
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Love one another
“Love one another,” Jesus said; but talk is cheap. “Love is active rebellion against anything that is not love,” Bishop Wright advised. It is defiant solidarity with the outcast and the oppressed, the immigrant and the orphaned, especially those orphaned by our own cruel and violent actions of family separation. Continue reading
The lamb, the sheep, and the good shepherd
Let me be uncomfortably clear: in the months and weeks following the deadly attacks on synagogues from Pittsburgh to Poway, California, reading John, putting into Jesus’ mouth the words, “you do not belong to my sheep,” cannot go unexamined or unchallenged. It is not enough to say, we don’t read much into that, nor mean anything by it; because if we do not, then others will make meaning of it, and we have seen where that can and does continue to lead; and it has not been to the vision of reconciliation and worship that John of Patmos proposed. Continue reading
Easter 2019: no idle tale
When the women returned from the empty tomb, they told the men all of this, and they thought that it was just another idle tale like so many others. How could they, even after all they had seen, fail to recognize that Jesus is like no other? But, to be fair, perhaps we too often treat the resurrection like a pretty myth that changes nothing much. Continue reading
Posted in holy days, lectionary reflection, sermon
Tagged Easter, Harrowing of Hell, Luke 24:1-12, Resurrection
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Maundy Thursday: the end of love
Love is a decision. It is our choice to make, and we cannot make the excuse that someone else destroyed it, if Jesus washed Judas’ feet, and healed the ear of the servant sent to arrest him, and restrained the angels from coming down from heaven to frighten the hell out of Herod and that weasel, Pontius Pilate, letting love be his gospel, and his end. Continue reading
Posted in holy days, homily, lectionary reflection, sermon
Tagged Jesus, love, Maundy Thursday
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The stones would shout
If these walls could speak, they would sing of the sun’s light seeping into sandstone, warming the night when Love comes calling … Continue reading
Posted in holy days, lectionary reflection, poetry, prayer, sermon preparation
Tagged Palm Sunday
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Anointing
They say that scent is the closest sense to memory; I wouldn’t know, but Jesus, enveloped in the memory of myrrh – his mother Mary eked it out, birth by birth – his mortality laid out end to end, Jesus … Continue reading
Posted in lectionary reflection, poetry
Tagged anointing of Jesus, John 12:1-8, Judas, Mary of Bethany, Year C Lent 5
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over the water 