The festival of Passover was a threat to the Roman authorities of Jesus’ day. After all, this was the week when the Jewish people remembered their liberation by God with feasting and with storytelling. It was the week when the Jewish people celebrated a God who led them out of...

I want to begin by taking a step back and putting our Gospel story for today, Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet with nard, into larger context. In the Gospel of John, we have seen Jesus call his disciples, begin his ministry by turning water into wine, clear the temple of...

I love Jesus’ parables. They are so simple and yet so complex. I especially love our parable for today, usually known as the parable of the prodigal son. No matter how often I read it or hear it read it has something new to say to me. At this point...

Most of the time I am very happy that we are a lectionary-based church. This means that the scripture we read on Sundays comes from a three-year schedule of assigned readings. I don’t pick the readings for a given Sunday. They are picked for us by the people who created...

When I was serving a church in Virginia, a member of my congregation shared with me her struggles with mental illness. She had been diagnosed at the age of 22 with bipolar disorder. She was 35 at the time I met and got to know her. You would never have...

Human beings are meaning makers. With our big and complex brains, we are able to take in and process a lot of information. We are also able to think about the information we take into our brains in an abstract way. It is what makes us distinct from other creatures....

I recently came across some sermon notes for Ash Wednesday that I made 15 years ago. My notes were all about Ash Wednesday reminding us of our mortality. I was struck by how much sense those notes made then, but don’t make now. I was amazed by how much our...

Painting by Christian Weber Have you heard the story about the little boy who was riding his tricycle down a sidewalk? Suddenly, one of the little wheels on the back fell off. The little boy jumped off his trike and said, “I’ll be damned!” At that very moment a priest...

There are so many sermons that could be preached from our Gospel reading for this morning, all of them equally important and valid, but as I doubt very much that you want to listen to me for the entire day, I am focusing on one particular part of the reading:...

Did you know that they make glasses that cause the wearer’s vision to be turned upside-down? When you look through the glasses, up is down, left is right and right is left. The idea behind the lesson is to help us understand how our eyes take in what they see...