Several years ago, when I was a brand new priest serving on the staff of the bishop of the Diocese of California, I was asked to be the spiritual director for a weekend retreat. The retreat, an extension of well-established prison ministry, was designed for women whose husbands or … Read the rest
Continue reading "The Name You Know" »
It’s all about the meals, according to New Testament scholar Robert Karris. In his book “Eating your Way through Luke’s Gospel,” he points out that Jesus almost always seems to be either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal. And in the Gospel we just heard, Jesus is teaching about … Read the rest
Continue reading "Dangerous Eating" »
I grew up with the lyric “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” etched in my memory. That reference surely dates me, although I confess that I was a pretty small child when my parents were playing Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” on our home stereo. My parents were themselves … Read the rest
Continue reading "Running with Saint Jonathan" »
As a child growing up in a house of many books but little religious instruction, I was fascinated by our remnant collection of Bibles, mostly squirreled away in obscure corners of dusty shelves. We were like the statistically average American household that owns 3.6 Bibles per reader, but nobody ever reads them. I wasn’t sure … Read the rest
Continue reading "Commissioned to Cross Boundaries" »I occasionally follow the online musings of a once-celebrated evangelical Christian blogger named Jen Hatmaker. Maybe you’ve heard of her? She came by her fame honestly; she hosted a rather charming blog about the foibles of Christian parenting in the 21st century, and she went on to become an author and sought-after speaker on … Read the rest
Continue reading "Costly Freedom" »Easter 5C
Grace Cathedral Evensong
“Who was I that I could hinder God?” asked Peter of the observant Jewish believers in Jerusalem. It was a fair question, if rhetorical. Who are you that you could hinder God? Really, who are any of us that we can hinder God?
Peter and his listeners already well knew that trying to hinder God … Read the rest
Continue reading "Three Choirs, One Song of Praise" »
Poor Thomas. He’s gotten such a bad name for nothing more than asking for reasonable verification. We might think of him as the Gospel’s first empirical scientist, and yet he’s come to be known as the doubter. That’s because subheadings in the Bible—added rather recently by translators and publishers—are interpretive. For good or ill, they … Read the rest
Continue reading "The Commissioning of the Wounded" »Easter Vigil 2019
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I do not long for resurrection. I am generally much more comfortable with death staying in its predictable tomb. And I’m pretty sure that same sentiment was true of the spice-bearing women who came to anoint the body of Jesus on a Sunday morning so very many years ago. They knew what to do … Read the rest
What do you really desire? I confess that I often don’t know. And even when I think I do know what I want, it turns out to be something quite unholy like a pint of Salt & Straw ice cream. So I find myself saying, like the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans, … Read the rest
Continue reading "The Discipline of Deeper Desire" »
Our own Honorary Canon Jim Bethell recently told me a story about visiting a crematorium and peering through the peephole that allowed him to see a human body in the process of becoming ash. His main takeaway was surprise. The body was luminous, he said. The process seemed to generate more of a glow than … Read the rest
Continue reading "Why Not Become Fire?" »