Sometimes, after visits of family or friends, when they go, one of the things that is hard to deal with is the silence. After we work hard to get the house and our work back to normal after taking time off visiting, etc., the quiet can become almost deafening. And it can be a little sad and lonely. And solitary. Ordinary life has its moments of silence and solitude and even loneliness.

I’ve always felt a little bit of a “let-down” like that on Ascension Sunday. We’ve just been through the Easter Season, with all its proclaimed new life and… Continue reading →

I want to be honest with you. I have never been able to connect very well with the passages in today’s lectionary readings. I do OK with the Psalm that forms the Old Testament Lesson, but the other two have been, through the years, pretty difficult and opaque to me. As time has gone on, I have also had more and more difficulty preaching and teaching what doesn’t, first, make sense to me. This isn’t an intellectual issue – I can figure out the meaning of the passages all right, what I struggle with is their significance for me or… Continue reading →

There’s no doubt in my mind that two of the lessons for this morning are among the best-loved readings in the Bible. The first is the 23rd Psalm, the second is Jesus’ Bible study on that Psalm in John 10.

If we start, as we should, at the beginning, with the Old Testament, we find this most wonderful description of the God of Israel. I know there’s a lot of thunder up on Mt. Sinai, and there’s a lot of noise about war and killing and punishment and many other disturbing things about God, ourselves, and others down in the… Continue reading →