I was taken by Isaiah chapter 40 long ago when I was just learning Hebrew. Through the years it has become my favourite passage in the Bible and has fed my soul over many decades now, as I come back to it again and again. This time I have come to it, asking to be fed yet again, by trying to think through what its words might say interpreted in the light of the feast of Pentecost which we celebrate today.

At Pentecost, the Church celebrates its divine empowerment for the mission of going out into the world in God’s… Continue reading →

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 →

Both Old and New Testament Lessons today speak of the God who is made known in acts and attitudes of openness and hospitality. These texts also encourage those who would be the People of this God who invites hospitality, to set a table in their community-life together, so as to become welcoming and inviting to one another and other folks in the wider world. This hospitality is not only a matter of food, but of openness, and an invitation to study, listen, and participate in community life.

Today’s Old Testament Lesson comes from what may well be the last layer… Continue reading →

The Church through the ages has devised several names for this Sunday. Mostly in the Eastern Orthodox Church, it is called Thomas Sunday. From this tradition, the Western Church adopted reading the story about Thomas and Jesus from John 20 as the yearly Gospel reading for the second Sunday of Easter. In the Eastern Church Thomas is not known for his doubting, but for his confession of faith that comes near the end of the story (“My Lord and My God.”) Thomas is also honoured by a tradition that names him as the missionary that took the Gospel to India… Continue reading →

My favourite poet is the 19th century New Englander Emily Dickinson, who was a recluse, and published almost nothing in her lifetime. After her death boxes of poems were found – short, pithy, cryptic, not a few a little iconoclastic. One of my very favourites, as it happens, is the one that goes this way:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or everyone be blind –

It has always… Continue reading →

Each Palm Sunday we look at one of the four accounts of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Each of the four contributes specific materials to the way in which we may try to understand what Jesus was up to when he rode into Jerusalem because it seem clear that he had a purpose in mind. The way we’ve been taught to think of this story probably has made it into a more spectacular event that it was. We were, I think, mostly taught to think of it as done with a “cast of thousands,” in a kind of Mardi Gras event… Continue reading →

It seems that we’ve been getting our April showers a little early this year, but at least it isn’t snow (for now)! As I was walking into the mall the other day, I was delighted to see some daffodils coming up. The landscapers aerated our lawn the other day. We took a drive up the Mississippi river yesterday and saw hints of buds on some trees. Even this “winter-lover’s” heart was warmed by these signs and they put a bit of “spring in my step,” so to speak. Does it do good things to you to think about Spring and… Continue reading →

One of the most difficult parts of discipleship is knowing how we can see our way clear to do the things we ought. Our spiritual vision is not always 20/20, any more than our physical vision is. Our scripture lessons today speak to the clarity and completeness of our vision, and both need to be taken into account when we think of living fruitful Christian lives.
The Old Testament Lesson reminds us that even Moses, the spiritual giant, who was permitted a direct vision of God’s glory and goodness (an almost unheard of thing in the Bible), discovered that he… Continue reading →