Easter 4B, April 29, 2012

O God of love, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Some of you know that every Monday night, ten months of every year, for the last fourteen years, I have volunteered at Suffolk County House of Correction in a program called “Art & Spirituality.” I like to say that we have completed fourteen years of what was meant to be a one-year project. The program provides the time to make greeting cards to give to people we love and are thinking about. The unconvicted and undetained sit together with the convicted and the detained at small tables spread with paper and envelopes, crayons, markers, pencils and pens, glue and scissors. (Yes, even scissors!) The “art” is primitive and the “spirituality” is subtle. It is the most spare, the most basic kind of Gospel ministry – a practice of showing up and being together in spite of the concrete and razor wire, and the myriad other barriers and traps that conspire to keep us apart. Continue reading →

Easter 2B, April 15, 2012

Acts 4:32-35  Everything they owned was held in common.
1 John 1:1-2:2 We are writing these things so that our [or your] joy may be complete.
John 20:19-31 Peace be with you.

O God of life, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Of all the Gospel lessons that get read in church on Sundays, the only one that gets read every year without fail in the 3 year lectionary cycle, is this one that we just heard. There are 5 written accounts of Jesus resurrection that made it into our canon of scripture – accounts that have significant “factual” discrepancies — and within those five separate narratives, there are about a dozen Risen Lord appearance stories. But it’s this story that gets repeated over and over — read every year on the Sunday after Easter, no matter what. The effect is that this appearance story becomes THE appearance story – and too often, the heavy-handed moral made of this story is that somehow a faithful Christian does not have doubts. Nonsense. Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is essential to faith.[1] Continue reading →

Easter, Year B, April 8, 2012

Isaiah 25:6-9 The LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
1 Corinthians 15:1-11 By the grace of God I am what I am.
John 20:1-18 I have seen the Lord.

 O God of mystery and mischief, grant us the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may and cost what it will.

You might know that I have been spending a considerable amount of time with Mary Magdalene lately (or Miriam from Migdal as she would be called in Hebrew). She is the namesake of the prophet Miriam, who was the sister of Moses. The prophet Miriam was a religious leader in ancient Israel, divinely commissioned to lead the Hebrew people along with Moses and Aaron during the journey in the wilderness which followed the Exodus from Egypt. The Song of Miriam in the book of Exodus is thought to be the oldest piece of scripture in the whole Bible. Continue reading →

Palm Sunday, Year B, April 5, 2012

O God, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Holy Week – beginning with Palm Sunday – is often a time when we hear and are encouraged to identify with failure – failure of trust, failure of faith, failure to stay awake and alert, failure to pray, the failure of truth, failure of government, the failure of troops charged with keeping the peace, the failure of religious leaders, the failure of crowds of people. Most of the time in our Palm Sunday services, in a practice that goes back 1000 years, the congregation is expected to take the part of the crowd that shouts “crucify him.” I have to tell you I don’t like that practice at all. Continue reading →