SABBATH
Sunday. Sabbath time. Growing up, the day just sort of lasted forever, it just went on and on. Church, Sunday dinner, visiting, maybe some time to play. There wasn’t all that much to do or anywhere to go. Church, food, visiting, sitting around. I understand the gift of it now, but then it just felt […]
STRESS
Stress. Too little of it and we stop growing, we wither away. Too much of it and it eventually destroys us, our bodies, our minds, our relationships. We mostly hear about too much stress, high blood pressure, weight issues, anger, depression, addiction. Coping with stress. Reducing stress. Many animals when under stress will kill and […]
CHASING AFTER WIND
You know the story. He worked and worked, was busy and more busy, putting things off with his wife, with his children, with his friends and community, with his faith. He would get to all that later, when there was more time. Finally he had a more time, but the kids were grown and gone. […]
PRAYER
It is the middle of the night. “Hey! Open the window!” “Did you hear something?” Yeah. Someone outside is yelling at you to open the window.” “For me? How do you know it’s for me? It might be for you.” ‘Because I said so.” “Oh” “Hey! Open the window!” So he opens the window, and […]
CONSUMING MERCY
Life is brutal. We try to sugar coat that fact, but ultimately life is fatal. Life can be like robbers attacking a passing innocent and unsuspecting stranger, unexpected and violent. Sometimes we survive…for awhile. Sometimes we don’t. What do we do about it? Do we hide from the suffering? Do we walk on by? […]
Independence Day
“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the […]
A FUNERAL INTERUPTED
We all have funeral stories, strange, surprising, sad, funny stories about the events that surround our burial customs. Weddings and funerals seem to accumulate stories that grow in the telling. At my previous parish, the front door of the church was near the street, a short series of steps ended at the curb. It […]
Finding Faith
What is faith? What does faith look like? How do we find faith? How do we come to faith? Most of us have probably heard the definition of faith from the letter to the Hebrews that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” The language of that […]
HOLY VISITOR’S
A hot dry day, straight out of a cowboy movie, three strangers come riding into town. A buzzard cries out in the sky. They ride into one town, and they are greeted by a barren older couple that has no future, stuck at a dead end and have been for decades. The older couple […]
Messed up knees
Baptism is either the most important day in our lives or it isn’t. Our baptismal covenant either means everything or it means nothing. I have to talk about Flannery O’Connor again, the famous southern fiction writer, a deeply devout Roman Catholic. For a while in the 1950s she moved among literary circles in New York […]
Transition
Cicadas. They are on the way. One of those rare mass hatchings of the 17 year cicada is about to happen. I realize that most people don’t like cicadas; they are kind of scary looking. Gill Powell told me I should talk about butter flies, as they are pretty looking. But, ever since I was […]
TROUBLING THE WATERS
Where I grew up there was a neighborhood swimming pool, it was packed all summer. Sometimes at night we would get a large group of 20 to 30 kids together and play this game called Rock the Deep End. The goal was to fill the deep end of the pool with giant waves that splashed […]
TOO MUCH
Midnight, on the backside of a barrier island, in the marsh, the moon is full, the tide comes in and we cast our nets, and we bring in the shrimp, net after net full of shrimp. We feast royally in the darkness of the early morning. What a wonderful surprise. One of those things I’ll […]
IDLE TALK
Something happened. Was it just idle talk? That was the initial reaction of the apostles to the news about the empty tomb. And then there was that message from the strange men with dazzling cloths that, “He is not here but has risen.” Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and the other women […]
CSI
So we carefully go over the crime scene trying to determine how this could happen. Good Friday. Two things are clear. Jesus is dead, a horrible brutal death. And that we are responsible. There it is. However we put the pieces together the conclusion is the same, we killed him. Did God set us […]
BEAUTIFUL FEET
“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” The prophet Isaiah said that. The apostle Paul liked it so much that he said it again in his letter to the Romans. A vision of feet […]
FEET
A few years ago I went on a long walk, a pilgrimage, several hundred miles. It was hard on the feet. Every night the pilgrims gathered to care for our feet, to soak them, to bandage them. There was this one village where this lady ran a hostel for the pilgrims, she was a nurse. […]
COME AS YOU ARE
It is an odd hour of the day or night…The phone rings…or a knock at the door…and the invitation is given…a gathering, right now, come as you are, or don’t come at all. It was one of the things that teen agers did in the 50’s and 60’s. People would show up in pajamas […]
COME AS YOU ARE
It is an odd hour of the day or night…The phone rings…or a knock at the door…and the invitation is given…a gathering, right now, come as you are, or don’t come at all. It was one of the things that teen agers did in the 50’s and 60’s. People would show up in pajamas […]
PRODIGAL GOSPEL
In the 1970’s my Grandmother worked at a bridal shop on Main Street in Greenville. I was a very young child, I remember the smell of fabric and gardenia perfume. The whole place made me feel itchy. Grandmother would bring me and my brother Geoffrey there from time to time to show us off. It […]
HURRY
Well I lay my head on the rail road track waiting on the double E, but the train don’t run through here no more, poor, poor pitiful me…Lord have mercy on me, woe woe is me. One of my all time favorite songs. Linda Rondstadt put it on the charts in 1977, and Terri […]
FOX AND HEN
The game begins…it is an ancient game. The hen and the chicks walk up to the fox, they are all in a line behind the hen, and they ask, “What are you doing old fox?” The fox replies, “Picking up sticks.” The hen and the chicks then say, “What for?” Fox says, “To make a […]
THE LONG WALK
A long walk. A really, really long walk, with blisters and everything, day after day after day. That is Lent. A long journey, not a pleasant trip or visit, but something long and difficult. My family has recently come across old family records and letters and photographs going back to the early 1900’s. My […]
FALLING WITH STYLE
The right beginning of repentance, the tipping point, between what was and what will be, that is what we do this day. We mark the beginning of repentance by having ashes rubbed in our faces, the ashes of our failure, and the ashes of our mortality. We often treat this journey of following […]