Luke 1: 26-38 In the midst of everything else about this Christmas season, the secular attachments and the religious meanings; at the very center of it this is a story about women having babies. It’s about pregnancy and childbirth. And today we rest our minds on that. In Luke’s gospel, it is a story about two women – Elizabeth and Mary – both finding themselves pregnant in the most unexpected circumstances. Elizabeth, older cousin to Mary and wife of the priest Zechariah, is too old for having babies. For Elizabeth, those years have passed and left her empty. She is barren, the term the Bible uses, like other women we have seen in the scriptures: Sarah, the wife of Abraham; Rachel, the wife of Jacob; Hannah, the wife of Elkanah. All these women waited for their turn to come, while they watched their peers’ swelling bellies and glowing faces; they […]

Luke 1: 5-17 If you know one thing about Advent, you know it is a season of waiting. And waiting can be so hard. Last week we lit the Advent wreath in our home for the first time this year. Lena looked at all the candles and asked, “How many?” I said, “Just one.” And later she asked, “And tomorrow we get to light two?” and I said, “No. We wait a week before we light two candles.” And Lena made a little squeaky sound of angst. Because this is just one more thing she is required to wait for this season, and a week may as well be 10 years in her mind. On this second Sunday of Advent, we still wait. And on this day of our journey toward Bethlehem we are in Jerusalem. It is one of the oldest cities in the world, with a population 60 […]

Romans 8: 18-25 Luke 2: 1-3 Of all the journeys I have taken in life, the one that stands out the most in my memory is the trip I took to Cuba with my seminary classmates. One reason it stands out was its general weirdness. First of all seminarians are weird. A bunch of people from different walks of life who all come together because they are a rare breed of individual who has heard and then responded to a call from God. All of us feeling kind of touchy and vulnerable because we don’t know where we are going physically, spiritually, intellectually. And then we are sent on this trip to a place that takes us out of whatever is left of our comfort zone. For three weeks. With zero calls or texts home. So people tended to act strangely at times. One of my travel companions turned to […]

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17 There is a little story that I tell sometimes on Christmas Eve. A woman lost her most valuable possession: a diamond ring. So upset, she called her sister, who came over right away to help her look for it. They got down on their hands and knees and began searching, inch by inch over the carpet in the living room. When her husband got home he saw the two women crawling around on the living room floor, intently looking at the carpet, serious as could be. He asked what they were doing. His wife said, “I lost my diamond ring and we’re looking for it.” Well, he got right down on the floor with them to help in the search. The three of them were now crawling on the floor, inch by inch, searching for the lost ring. After what seemed like hours of fruitless searching the […]

Ruth 1:1-18 Mark 12:38-44 Joan Chittister said life is made up of a series of defining moments. Some of the moments are shared experiences: the great depression, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 – these are a few of the big ones that come to mind. All of us experience them together and, not only do they contribute to the formation of who we are personally, they shape the culture we are all a part of. But other experiences are personal: an illness you experienced, a conversation you had with someone, a marriage, a job, a child – things that become part of the story of who you are. And that is what it is – a story. I think one of the defining features of being human is the search for meaning. It is important for our lives to have meaning, and so we look for it in our experiences, we make […]

Mark12:28-34 To what can I compare this scene in Mark 12? I am remembering the experience I had about 20 years ago of being examined for ordination on the floor of presbytery. It is an experience one goes into with fear and trembling. Picture this. As you, the examinee, stands in front of the gathering, they proceed to ask their questions: Where do you stand on eschatology? Would you say you’re a premillennialist? Postmillennialist? Amillenialist? Are you more a Zwinglian or a Calvinist on the matter of the eucharist? Or, heaven forbid, a Lutheran??? Do your views on God’s sovereignty and human free will conform more to a Reformed or an Arminian theology? And then one person stands up and says, “Tell us something about God’s love.” This scribe who approaches Jesus in Mark 12 is that person. This scribe knew the answer to his question before he asked Jesus, […]

Colossians 4:2-6 Mark 10:46-52 Sometimes in the movies, and sometimes even in real life, there are critical moments where time slows down. Moments when you notice every second of what you are experiencing, when it feels as though a message is being conveyed to you. The message is: in this moment, everything changes. I have had that feeling about our journey these last few weeks in Chapter 10 of Mark’s gospel. Time slowed down. We have not rushed through it. We have not used the Cliff Notes version of this. We have absorbed every word. Because there is an important message. And everything is about to change. He is drawing near the end of his journey. He is taking his disciples from Galilee, which was home for most of them. It was the sticks, out at the margins of civilization. But now they were leaving Galilee and moving toward Jerusalem. […]

John15:15 Mark 10:35-45 You’re sitting with a friend, and suddenly your friend says, “Look. I need to tell you something but please promise me you won’t be mad.” When your friend says, “promise you won’t be mad,” you know that friend is about to tell you something that is guaranteed to make you mad, right? Same situation here. Jesus’ friends say, “promise you will do for us whatever we ask of you,” because they are about to ask something from him that is really too much to ask. But Jesus plays along. “What do you want,” he asks them. I imagine him grinning at this moment. They say to him, “Give us the best seats in your glory. The throne at your right hand and the throne at your left hand. Please, thank you.” Listen, this is a weird thing for them to ask. Even for these guys who are […]

Ephesians 4:31-5:2 Mark 10:17-31 One of my sisters, when she was a very young child used to ask an interesting question. She wondered, “When am I going to turn into a boy?” She never did, actually. But young children can express some funny ideas about their sense of identity. There is a lot of work involved in developing your own sense of who you are, and this was part of the work for my sister when she was four years old. When we grow into adolescence we tend to look to our peers as a means of figuring out who we are. We want to be accepted by them, we want to be liked, and we want to like ourselves. We want to know who we are, and one dimension of that is knowing who we are not. We finished our five-week study on risks we must take for peace […]

Genesis 2:18-24 Mark 10:2-16 I took my title today from the classic English novel, Howard’s End. It is a story about two families, the Wilcoxes and the Schegels. Two families who wind up in a great dispute about a house, two families whose characters are so different, whose worldviews and values are so different, they have difficulty even understanding one another, let alone coming to a resolution about the house. There is one character in the story who, alone, seems able to bridge the gap. She pleads with the others to find a way to connect the head and the heart, the prose and the passion, the yin and the yang. Only connect the different values and viewpoints. She is a Schegel by birth and a Wilcox by marriage. She stands in the middle of this dispute and pleads, only connect! It is a phrase I have always loved; it […]