John 20:19-31
The passage of House Bill 2 recently and the social debate that’s gone on after it got me to thinking a lot this week… about how much difference there is between law and Gospel. They are never the same thing. The issues of race and forgiveness and care seldom show up in the laws that grab our attention — that is so core to the Gospel. It got me to thinking about what it means to be left out, what it means to be overlooked and not understood.
John 20:1-18
Happy Easter! Often times when we think of Easter, we think of Easter as an event — an event that happened: Jesus the Christ raised from the dead. But if we look closely at the scriptures and all the Gospel stories that tell of the resurrection, I’d suggest it’s not so much an event that’s being described as much as an experience: the experience of the risen Christ.
John 20:1-18
Happy Easter! [Father George enters dressed in a hard hat and tool belt.] How many children are here? If you’re honest, we’re all children at heart… I want to talk to you about something today, particularly to the children: how did people know that Jesus Christ had been raised from the dead?
Romans 6:3-11; Luke 24:1-12
Perseveration is a brain dysfunction. It shows itself by someone acting in a way over and over again, despite the fact that the action may be meaningless or cause harm or even death… Despite the fact that it’s from a medical model, you can stretch this definition to include behaviors of ours that are destructive and yet continue.
John 18:1-19:42
One of the best-known hymns of the American South is a hymn for Good Friday, and it begins with both a declaration and a question:
What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss
To bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,
To bear the dreadful curse for my soul.
This and most of our Good Friday hymns call the crucifixion of Christ both a dreadful curse and an act of unfathomable generosity and love…
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Memory is a terrible and a wonderful thing. As we focus on the bombings in Belgium just now, there is memory, not just of those whose lives were lost or who are scarred by the events there, but here too. Many of us may well journey back to 9/11, those we knew, how we felt. The hurt or the anger that lingers in our bones at not feeling safe anymore, not feeling always safe. And voices fill the airwaves, “Who do we blame? Who are we to watch?”…
Palm Sunday, Luke 22:14-23:56
I want to share a few thoughts on this Palm Sunday and this week we’re entering into that we call holy…
Isaiah 43:16-21; John 12:1-8
Memory is an amazing thing, isn’t it? The ability to store vast amounts of information in your head — not just factual information… but also personal experiences, sensations, emotions, the way things felt to us… These things that happened in the past and our memory of them continue to shape our identity and give our life meaning…
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
Carl Jung is someone who I really admire as a thinker, as a psychologist, with tremendous insight into the human mind and the way we find and discover meaning in our lives . . . I want to share a quote with you from Carl Jung as a lens for the reading from Luke’s gospel: “One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening.”
Luke 13:1-9
We begin the liturgy on each of these Sundays in Lent with the Decalogue, a reciting of the Ten Commandments, a gentle prayer for mercy in the keeping of them, and then we go about making a confession acknowledging in some way we’ve not quite kept everything we intended. This reminds us that there are guideposts in our lives. There are times when we fail and when we sin.