Jeremiah 33:14-16 Advent always gets here before I am ready for it. No matter how good my intentions, I am never quite prepared; I am surprised by the arrival of Advent, wishing time would slow down. But if the season of Advent is about making time and space to get ourselves ready, then maybe that’s as it should be. Maybe I don’t need to get ready to begin getting ready. However it may be, here we are…at this special time…Advent 2021. And like it does every year, Advent takes us as we are – where we each are personally, where we are as a congregation, where we are in the world. And where we are in the world is still kind of a hard place. We have been in this COVID season way too long for us to keep it in the forefront of our minds – and yet, even […]
Continue readingMonth: November 2021
Freedom
Genesis 2:4-7,15-18,21-25, 3:1-8 Several years ago, I saw a film about Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple. He was a fascinating person, a bit of an enigma. What was it about Jobs that made him so successful? He was not especially kind or likeable. He was not a gifted programmer, like his partner Wozniak. He was not a businessman. What was he? What was his genius? He was a creator. There is one scene in the movie where he obsesses about the dimensions of his new computer, the Next. It was a black cube, but apparently the dimensions had to be off just a fraction of an inch for the human eye to perceive it as a cube. The production staff got it wrong, and Steve was not satisfied with the results. He actually had a million other problems more urgent than this, but this was the one he obsessed […]
Continue readingThe One Who Makes All Things New
Revelation 21:1-6a Frederick Buechner wrote an essay describing a dream he once had. In it, he was staying in a hotel. He was aware that he really, really, loved this room. Much more than you should, actually, love a hotel room. Somehow, in this room he felt happy and at peace. It seemed like everything in the room was exactly as it should be. And it felt as if he, himself, was exactly as he should be. At some point he wandered off to other places and did other things, the way it often happens in dreams. Eventually, he returned to the hotel, but this time he was in a different room and it was not a comfortable experience. He went to the front desk. He explained to the clerk that he would like to have his old room back, that everything about it was perfect and he would much rather be […]
Continue readingComing Home to You, Part 6: Choose Love
Mark 12:28-34 When I was a child I went to sleepover parties with my friends. The goal of sleepovers was to stay up all night, and the best way of doing that was to play at scaring ourselves silly. We played with a Ouija board and convinced ourselves that some spirit was moving the piece around the board, and we screamed. We played some kind of levitation game where one girl would lie on the floor and the others would kneel around her and place two fingers underneath the girl’s body. The girl would start to rise from the ground and we screamed. We played a game we called Mary Worth, where we had to look at ourselves in the mirror in a dark room, and repeat, I believe in Mary Worth, until the face of Mary Worth would appear in the mirror. No one had any idea who Mary Worth […]
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