Today we are reeling from the news of the senseless and evil violence done to the innocent worshipers at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Our elder sisters and brothers in Judaism are God’s Chosen people and nothing will separate them from the Covenant their ancestors made with Holy and Living One. I ask Episcopalians across Rhode Island to please add this prayer to God asking for rest for the departed (El Maleh Rachamim) to […]
I’ve been reading and working through the implications of Rene Girard’s insights into human relationships for years – particularly the way that Girard unlocks a new way of reading the biblical texts. If you’ve heard me preach or teach over the years you probably know how major an influence Girard has been on my thinking. There’s a wonderful resource “Teaching Non-violent Atonement” that’s been posting a regular Wednesday sermon that demonstrates how a preacher can […]
Dan Edwards, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada writes in his Good Friday sermon this year: We live in a world that worships success. We have little use for the old religion of self-denial. We practice disciplines of self-coddling. The chaplain of a national Episcopal group this year actually wrote a Lenten letter urging us to go to a spa and relax in sensual delight for our Lenten discipline. Our society averts its eyes […]
It snowed on Friday. A tropical system, full of moisture and relatively warm air, slid north along the Southern New England coast and collided with cold arctic air flowing down out of Canada. The result was a fast developing, very wet snow fall that started at dawn and continued until an hour before twilight. The wet snow and the relatively gentle wind off the ocean allowed the thick white heavy flakes to stick to every […]
I wonder how things might have been different for the Church and for our Country if we had committed ourselves to using our privilege, our place at the table, to stand up and be the voice for those who were denied their place at the table?
I preached this sermon last week at the 2014 Ecumenical Round Table meeting on Science, Technology and the Church meeting in Salt Lake City last week. A rabbi once told me, in a conversation about faith and science, that God hides the truth from us, and expects us to work, using all of our faculties to find it. That’s a counter to the common understanding of how Science or Theology work, but for those of […]
It’s taken years for me to finally understand the deep significance of Jesus, the Lamb of God, describing himself as a Mother Hen gathering her chicks under her wings in Jerusalem. It was reading a missionary’s experience while teaching in Tanzania that was where I found the key to unlocking what I believe is his meaning. Having understand him finally, I started to ask what you and I in the Church were expected to do […]
Please ignore this post. I’m testing the ability of WordPress to host my sermon audio files directly. (I’ve been using another service, but I’m not seeing an advantage to using it anymore.) Epiphany 2C 2013.m4a Looks like it’s working about as well as the other service that I use. Are you able to listen to the file? (Or do I need to transcode it to mp3 before uploading? It works on my laptop, but may […]
There is reason to believe that the United States is about to enter into a period of increasing sectarian violence. In some places the shooting has already started. How are we as Christians, as Episcopalians, as members of Trinity Cathedral supposed to respond? The lessons we used in this final sermon were the same as were used at my installation 6 years ago; the gospel was John 15:9-16. You can read the notes that used […]
When Jesus speaks, in John's Gospel, about being the bread of life, he is explicitly identifying himself as the Messiah to his listeners. He is telling them that he is going to bring the return of the miraculous manna to the children of Israel. It was the sign that the people of the time expected of the Messiah. I'm taken with how Jesus reshapes the passover ritual given my Moses into the passover of the […]
