“I will not leave you orphaned,” Jesus says. “I am coming to you.” It is one of the tenderest promises in John’s Gospel. And it comes at a moment when tenderness is desperately needed. Jesus is speaking to his friends on the night before he dies. The table has been shared. Feet have been washed. […]

John’s ninth chapter begins with a man sitting by the roadside, a man born blind, and almost immediately the people around him begin talking about him rather than to him. The disciples ask, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” It is a cruel question disguised as a religious […]

In a nation and a world that is divided by so much right now I bet we could all agree that this little passage from Luke for this morning is really tough. So tough that most would choose to avoid it, but not the creators of our lectionary. They have made sure that we deal […]

When I woke up on the morning of November 6, the day after the election, the first action I took was to pick up my phone to see the results, I suspect most of you did the same thing. For some, the results brought joy and a sense of relief, a feeling that the world […]

Last week I spoke about wisdom and that an aspect of having wisdom is the ability to imagine a world that is different from the world in which we currently live and move and have our being. I think a lot of what Jesus preached, taught and did were his attempts to help his followers […]

One of the most haunting stories I’ve ever read is from Jim Wallis, in his book, Call to Conversion. Wallis describes something that happened at a conference in New York City on social justice that included religious leaders of all kinds. “At one point,” he recalls, “a Native American man stood up, looked out over […]