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  [A correction has been made to Joyce’s age in this latest version of the post.] And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. —1 Corinthians 13:13 Right now my father-in-law is waiting at the hospital for Joyce to die. Joyce is in her early nineties, and…

The soundtrack to the movie, “The Mission”- about a group of Jesuit missionaries in eighteenth century South America who live and die alongside the indigenous Guarani people, when they are slaughtered and their land forcibly taken by Portuguese colonialists- almost always makes me cry. Its refrains seem to embody a life lived passionately for God,…

Yesterday fellow saint and sinner Tammy shared this meditation on the meaning of Good Friday; but its use of J.R.R. Tolkien’s term, “eucatastrophe,” also makes it an Easter sermon for anyone anywhere who has sat, metaphorically speaking, outside a tomb of one kind or another, waiting for something better to happen. The musical feature for…

I’ll preach the following sermon in just a few hours at today’s “Women’s View of the Cross”: A Service for Good Friday. (I appreciate your prayers!) This sermon takes the perspective of the maidservant in the court of the high priest, Caiphas; if you’ve been a regular here at this intersection between life and God,…

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.  This final victory lap of the book; the last touches on a manuscript that I now a bit bashfully would let other eyes see for the very first time: they were supposed to come with the peaceful satisfaction of hard-won achievement. I had come to the monastery to…

  Walter Brueggemann’s review of Douglas John Hall’s latest book, Waiting for Gospel: An Appeal to the Dispirited Remnants of Protestant “Establishment” (Cascade), in the current issue of The Christian Century, sums up well the depressing state of the mainstream American church: Brueggemann describes the first part of Douglas’ book as a critique of “the systemic reductionism…

Almost one year ago, in the week leading up to Christmas, I met “the driftwood artist.” I wonder if he is still there peddling his art on that part of coastal highway that runs through St. Petersburg, Florida. And,  I wonder if all of life, really, is about cobbling together something beautiful out of the…

“If any of you come to me…and don’t hate your father and your mother, your wife and your children, your brothers and your sisters- yes, and even your own life!- you can’t be my disciple.” – Luke 14:26 So much for “family values.”  Maybe that’s because Jesus, as N.T. Wright reminds us in his commentary…

“We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.” – 2 Corinthians 4:10 —————————- “Christ is risen!”  My cup is running over- or so I’m told. Meanwhile, the violence of a murderous regime in Syria spills across borders and the blood…

Finally, the sermon that many of you helped me write in encouraging the use of “appropriate” humor even on the darkest day of the church calendar.  Today’s Good Friday service at Mount Zion A.M.E. will be a series of  meditations on the perspectives of the women who appear throughout the Passion narrative- Pilate’s wife, Claudia,…
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