Bless Your Heart

Epiphany 4A

Are you poor? Are you sad or hungry or feeling unworthy? Are you persecuted? Well then, blessed are you. Enjoy all your blessings!

Do Matthew’s beatitudes leave you just a bit uncomfortable? Blessings might a great reward in heaven, but—let’s be honest here—these earthly attributes that apparently bring about heavenly blessing are kind of hard to bear in … Read the rest

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Catching and Mending

Epiphany 3A

It’s commonly been said—although evidently never by Albert Einstein—that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” I’m guessing you’ve heard that saying: it’s a kind of a secular Gospel in a place like Silicon Valley, where disrupting business as usual IS business as usual.

That principle has been … Read the rest

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Thankfully Healed

Proper 23C

Ten lepers healed. Shout about that miracle from the rooftops! In an age of readily accessible medicine, it’s easy for us to forget the high cost of sickness in Jesus’ time. So let me bring it home to you: leprosy, which might have described any number of painful and debilitating skin diseases, would also have been cause for … Read the rest

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Transfiguration & Today

Last Epiphany

What our church calls “the season after the Epiphany” comes to a conclusion this Sunday, and next Sunday we’ll enter into the deeply reflective season of Lent. This morning’s readings, in the spirit of all things Epiphany—whose season is all about the revealing of Christ’s identity—include two stories of awe-inspiring mountain events. One is about Moses’ encounter with … Read the rest

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Chaos into Quiet

Palm Sunday 2021

Whew. This gut-wrenching Palm Sunday story, dramatically read by our deacon and his family, reads like a catalog of provocative questions and defamatory statements about Jesus’ identity. At the outset, Pilate asks Jesus if he is king of the Jews, and then the Gospel ends with a centurion proclaiming “truly this man was God’s son.” In between, … Read the rest

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Leveling Up to God

Epiphany 1A/Baptism of Our Lordcolumbia-river-mouth

Last Sunday on the Feast of the Holy Name, my colleague Marlene preached about the importance of letting go of names that no longer suit us. So in the three months since I’ve moved here from the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve been practicing a new way of naming myself: Oregonian. I’m actually the fourth … Read the rest

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Indelibly Inked

Tattoos.pngFor years I have carried the memory of a sermon in which an Episcopal priest posed the question of why we don’t anoint people with indelible oil. That is, when we are baptized—marked as Christ’s own forever—why isn’t the mark more visible? The obvious answer to this rhetorical question being that the visible sign of our identity as Jesus-followers ought … Read the rest

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The Stable and the Supernova

John 1:1-14

Explosion of planet or star

Merry Christmas!

If you happen to have been here Christmas eve—I was, I go to church a lot—you might recall that yesterday’s readings and pageant were all about shepherds, angels, and the baby in the manger. The familiar—if peculiar—story of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem is a tale of wonder and courage and extraordinary generosity on the part of … Read the rest

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Tears of Pain and Power

Proper 6Ctears

It’s the tears that really get to me in this story. Everything that the woman does is unexpected: the bold entry into the house of a Pharisee, the weeping, the anointing, the contact with the rabbi’s feet, the loosened hair. The reality and the symbolism of each of these actions is quite extraordinary. Even more so if we … Read the rest

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Take Up Your Towel

TowelsMaundy Thursday

For several days last week, I was driving around with a kind of scary black garbage bag in the back of my car. And the bag got a bit scarier every day that it stayed there, because it was full of damp used towels. Towels that came from a service of footwashing. And the feet belonged to the … Read the rest

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