Micah 5:2-5a Luke 1: 39-55 About 15 years ago there was a woman driving home from work in Chicago and, driving through an underpass, she saw a vision of the virgin Mary on the wall. And thus was born Our Lady of the Underpass, a place of pilgrimage, where the faithful bring flowers and candles to a little altar they have set up. In the underpass. Have you ever driven in Chicago? The thought of supplicants kneeling before the shrine while traffic whizzes by, inches away from their bodies – terrifying. Yet, it’s a reminder that the image of Mary is extremely powerful for the church, particularly the Roman Catholic church. She is venerated because she was chosen by God to bear God’s son in her body. She is called, in Greek, Theotokos, which means God-bearer. She is holiest among women because she was chosen to be the vessel of God’s […]
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Advent 3: Enough
Isaiah 12: 2-6 Luke 3: 7-18 The moment you have been waiting for all year: John the Baptist, the cranky prophet, here to tell us it’s the end of the world as we know it. Cheers. I don’t often think about the end of the world. Hardly ever by choice. But when I do think about it, I start to think about what I would miss. Do you ever think about those things? I would miss a good seafood dinner and a nice wine to go with it. I would miss the taste of good chocolate. There are so many good tastes I would miss. I would miss the sound of music. Not necessarily the Julie Andrews movie, although that’s nice, but just hearing music, making music. Playing quiet instrumental music on the speakers while I work, listening to Norah Jones sing while I cook dinner, singing hymns on Sunday. […]
Continue readingAdvent 2: A Place at the Table
Baruch 5: 1-5 Philippians 1:3-11 When I was a child, we lived in a crowded house. I had three sisters, and my grandmother lived with us for much of my childhood, as well. And there was about a year when we had someone else living with us too. My mother brought a young woman into our home who was struggling with grief. I was too young to understand the circumstances; I just knew that Marie was broken, fragile. Still, she was a beloved big sister to me and my sisters. I remember, too, gaggles of young Filipina women in our house. Back in the 1960s the U.S. opened immigration and many nurses came into the country from the Philippines, to meet the need at the time. The hospital where my mother worked hired a lot of them. When my mother looked at these nurses she saw girls who were lonely […]
Continue readingAdvent 1: Making Room
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 […]
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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 […]
Continue readingComing Home to You, Part 5: Be Bold
Mark 10:46-52 In our session meeting last week we talked about inclusivity, about bringing people in from the margins. Which isn’t always easy. Sometimes we just don’t know how to approach them. Usually it requires making some changes to how we do things, to accommodate the needs or comfort level of the ones we want to include. We haven’t always thought about things this way; there was a time, not that long ago, when we didn’t worry too much about who was being excluded from our activities. When I was young there was no such thing as mainstreaming children with disabilities. They went to school somewhere else, if they went to school at all. Back in Jesus’ day, if folks thought at all about disabilities, such as blindness, they were disturbed by it. So much that people like Bartimaeus were shunned. They believed blindness was a punishment dealt by God […]
Continue readingComing Home to You, Part 4: To Cultivate a Servant Heart
Mark 10:35-45 I have been listening to a podcast for the past few weeks about a church that fell apart. It rose to great heights and then came crashing down almost overnight. It was started in the spring of 1996 by three men. They began meeting in homes, and then graduated to borrowing space in a local church. by fall of that year they were up to about 160 people. The next year they began holding two weekly services. Two years later they were averaging about 350 in worship, and in a few more years they transitioned to a multi-site church, with video hook-up at each campus streaming in the sermons of Lead Pastor Mark Driscoll. Of the three men who started up Mars Hill Church, Mark Driscoll soon emerged as the front man. He was a very gifted speaker, had a strong vision for the church and natural leadership […]
Continue readingComing Home to You, Part 3: All In
Mark10:17-31 One of the favorite films in our family is The Princess Bride. We can watch it together over and over and always enjoy. It’s a story about a princess who has been kidnapped by some bad guys who hope to set off a war in the kingdom. Either that or it’s a story about true love. Or else it’s a story about a grandfather reading a fairy tale to his grandson. Whatever it is, it’s funny and sweet. The character Vizzini, a Sicilian mastermind criminal played by the actor Wallace Shawn, has kidnapped the princess Buttercup. Inigo Montoya, a Spanish swordsman and Fezzik, a giant, assist him in his criminal endeavors. They are all being pursued by a mysterious man in black. Vizzini tries to outwit the man in black, but every time they look back they discover he is still on their trail and gaining on them. Each […]
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