Tag Archives: Elijah

A sustaining hope

The interventions of God, strength for the journey, can come from humans sweating over laboratory test tubes as easily and as often as angels baking on hot stones. Continue reading

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Beholding glory

God’s grace and mercy have never left us, passing over us and shielding us from more than we can imagine; but how much glory can we handle, human as we are? Continue reading

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Year B Proper 27: the widows and the stewardship sermon

What a gift these readings are in the season of stewardship campaigns! They have a lot to say to us about trusting in the providence of God, about sharing, about giving, about the rewards of a faithful offering. What a … Continue reading

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Year B Proper 14: “goodness can go viral, too”

I have been where Elijah was. Not the physical location, exactly; Mount Horeb is thought to be in the south of the country, and I was in the north, staying at a kibbutz near the Lebanese border. It was a … Continue reading

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Year C Proper 5: if I make my bed in the grave

The fact that the stories we hear today, which echo one another so clearly that these two women might have been related, one the great-great grandmother of the other, a sister several times removed; the fact that these stories revolve … Continue reading

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Raising the dead

They say that Elijah raised a fatherless child, stretched out corpselike over his body, breathing for him, with him, breathing until his new life began. His mother, from then on, developed a habit of peering over his shoulder into the … Continue reading

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Religious rituals and summer Sunday attendance

Two days after my mother died, at half past five in the morning, I heard a strange noise outside my bedroom window, the window of the spare bedroom in my parent’s house. It was a rasping, grinding, rolling, grunting, sighing … Continue reading

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Year B Proper 27: All

Naomi had lost everything. She had nothing left to lose, nowhere left to go but home, no one on whom to lean, on whom she had a claim. So she gave it all up, sent her daughters-in-law away, tore up … Continue reading

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Year B: Last Sunday after the Epiphany

When I told my youngest child that my mother had died, she said, “But she was supposed to get better!” A week or so later, when I was talking to my father about talking to an old friend, he asked, … Continue reading

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