Mark 9:2-9 This past week, two news stories having to do with perfection captured my attention. The first story was that of the 136th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in New York, where 2,000 dogs were primped and pampered, walked and watched, poked and prodded until, finally, one dog was judged Best in Show. Now, I’m going to admit upfront: I did not like the results. The winner was a 4-year-old Pekinese named Malachy that to me looked like little more than a waddling dust mop. Me? I was pulling for the proud German shepherd … [Read more...]
Come and see
February 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment
John 1:29-42 The man was walking alongside the river late one night, trying to get from one place to the next, neither of them being home, but needing to keep going. It was a cold night, clear and crisp, with the stars shining brightly above him and the waters flowing smoothly beside him and the path laid out easily below him. Other people were walking that path beside the river with him, people also intent on getting from one place to the next, hoping that they could end their journeys for the day sooner rather than later, for no one likes to be out at night, especially … [Read more...]
Occupy God!
December 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Luke 2:1-20 In the summer of 1992, I was blessed to go to the Barcelona Olympics, to serve as an editor at that great sporting and cultural events. To do my job properly, I had to lug along one whole extra suitcase filled with reference books not for sports, but for the world – because this was in the days before the Internet, when Google wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s mind. The summer of 1992 was the culmination of some of the wildest three years in history. The Berlin Wall had come down, the Germanies were united, and the Soviet Union had collapsed. … [Read more...]
Why not??
October 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Philippians 4:1-9 OK, it is true confession time: How many of you have something that Steve Jobs created? ... How many of you have something that Steve Jobs created? iTunes? An iPod? An iPhone? An iMac? A MacBook? An iPad? Isn’t it amazing how ubiquitous those little things are? In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company that he had co-founded with Steve Wozniak, the company that had fired him, and within a few years of his return, our world was a different place. First he gave us the iPod, that magical little device that carried thousands of our songs. Two years … [Read more...]
Define yourself …
October 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Philippians 3:4b-14 Who are you? Who are you? How do you define yourself? When I was a child, back in the ‘60s (and yes, I’m telling you my age now) we used to define ourselves by our ethnicity … who was Irish, who was Italian, who was French, who was English. And while we might have been nice about the terms we used to define ourselves, we certainly were not nice when it came to defining others. By the time I was 7, I think I knew every derogatory term out there. You name an ethnicity, and I knew the name. And I used it. Because that’s what we did in those … [Read more...]
Gospel-worthy
September 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Philippians 1:21-30 The House of Bishops of The Episcopal Church is meeting in Quito, Ecuador, this week. One hundred and sixteen bishops from the 109 dioceses spread out over 16 nations have gathered to pray, to learn … and to think … One thing they were asked to think about came from Don Compier, a liberation theologian who recounted to the bishops a recent conversation he had had. Compier told them that “he was recently asked by someone in another denomination: ‘If you care about the poor, why are you an Episcopalian? Aren’t you just interested … [Read more...]
You are invited to the dance … whatchya gonna do?
September 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The keynote address at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, College Park, Md., at their Homecoming Dinner, 10 September 2011. A story from the 2nd century after Christ, of two monks in the Egyptian desert: A disciple went to Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I am able, I keep my little rule, my little fast and my little prayer. I strive to cleanse my mind of all evils thoughts and my heart of all evil intents. Now, what more should I do?”Abba Joseph rose up and stretched his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He answered, “Why not be transformed … [Read more...]
Be transformed!
August 21, 2011 By 2 Comments
Romans 12:1-8 A few weeks ago, I read Katheryn Stockett’s beautiful novel, The Help, which came out a couple of years ago and just this month debuted as a movie. It’s a beautiful book, my friends, telling the story of women, white and black, in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963 and ’64, at the height of the civil rights movement. Despite the darkness of the story – and there was a lot of darkness at that time in the history of our country – it was so well told that when I finished, I simply … sighed … with satisfaction. And then I heard that the movie was coming out and … [Read more...]
Step away from the lawn mower …
July 18, 2011 By 1 Comment
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 More than half my life ago, after I graduated from junior college, I moved to Milwaukee to live with my brother and his family while I attended university. I hadn’t been there very long when the family went on vacation, leaving me in charge of the house, the dog, the yard and my sister-in-law’s vegetable and flower gardens. I have to admit, while my family was gone, I probably wasn’t the best caretaker there ever was. So on the day they were due back home , I worked diligently – and frantically. I cleaned the house, and then worked outside. I weeded, I … [Read more...]
