Mark 13:24-37 Start with an earthquake, then build to a climax… Cecil B. DeMille When the shrill alarm of Advent Sunday texts sounds each year, drop-kicking us through Advent dread along the long road to Advent expectation, I think of stories like this one: It seemed like a good idea at the time: to turn [...]
December 2, 2007 Advent 1 Psalm 122 Isaiah 2:1-5 and Matthew 24:36-44 The other evening, finding myself unexpectedly alone and with nothing pressing to do, I was idly flipping through television channels when I happened upon a show my daughter told me I should watch sometime: House. During the moments I was watching, a young [...]
Too many times when I was a child, Christmas seemed to be about perfection. Perhaps it was a reaction to the uncertainty of circumstances—I grew up in the sixties with an Air Force officer father deployed in Vietnam—that made us try extra hard to keep Christmas. … Mom was a tree fanatic, wielding strict control [...]
"Ask for a sign," whispered Isaiah the prophet generations ago to a king standing at the brink of catastrophe, and, reading those words, I thought suddenly of the story of an old Jewish man, who, coming up from the subway into his street in Brooklyn, saw his neighbor’s business burning, and, pointing to the flames [...]
Scripture: Isaiah 11:1-10 and Matthew 11:2-11 Are you the one who is to come? Or should we look for another? Though these words were placed on the lips of a disillusioned and fatalistic John the Baptist some two thousand years ago, I think it is still a very good question. Are you the one we [...]
Advent Sunday Scripture: Psalm 122 and Isaiah 2:1-5 and Matthew 24:36-44 There’s a certain exotic comfort in imagining what it might be like to see the Second Coming of Christ, and I appreciate the opportunity the lectionary affords us each Advent to dabble in that esoterica of doomsday, Armageddon scenarios. One of our Wednesday morning [...]
Scripture: Luke 23:33-43 and Jeremiah 23:1-6 Note for Christ the King Sunday: In response to recent headlines in the Miami Herald and the NY Times that detail actions of the Presbyterian Church, USA and suggest, not without reason, that Presbyterian Christians, responding to events in the Middle East with somewhat careless disregard for our status [...]
Advent Day 1 Scripture: Jeremiah 33:14-16 and Luke 21:25-36 It seemed like a good idea at the time: to turn out the friendly lights that shine from the peak of our cabin into the night, to go out through the darkness of our woods, to stand in the meadow and look, unfettered by light, at [...]