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 […]
Watch the Helpers In a tragic moment like this, people often turn to the Church to help them make sense of what has happened. But, truth be told, we don’t have an answer for them. We don’t know what to think either. But while we may not know what to think, we do know what to do. A sermon preached at Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix, Arizona the Sunday following the shooting of 71 people in […]
"That historical reality affords us some latitude to consider the major ways that Christians have understood the atonement over the years, and to ponder some minority opinions as well. In each, the crucifixion is the solution. Where they differ is the problem. In other words, what is the problem that the crucifixion solves?
If Wikipedia wasn’t blacked out today, I’d suggest you first go and read up on the idea of the “Music of the Spheres”. It’s an idea that had it genesis in the writings of Pythagoras, who discovered the mathematical relationships between musical tones. The idea was further developed by Plato who suggested that since music and planetary motion both involved mathematical relationships between pairs and triads, that there must be a kind of planetary music […]
