As a child growing up in a house of many books but little religious instruction, I was fascinated by our remnant collection of Bibles, mostly squirreled away in obscure corners of dusty shelves. We were like the statistically average American household that owns 3.6 Bibles per reader, but nobody ever reads them. I wasn’t sure … Read the rest
Continue reading "Commissioned to Cross Boundaries" »I occasionally follow the online musings of a once-celebrated evangelical Christian blogger named Jen Hatmaker. Maybe you’ve heard of her? She came by her fame honestly; she hosted a rather charming blog about the foibles of Christian parenting in the 21st century, and she went on to become an author and sought-after speaker on … Read the rest
Continue reading "Costly Freedom" »Easter 5C
Grace Cathedral Evensong
“Who was I that I could hinder God?” asked Peter of the observant Jewish believers in Jerusalem. It was a fair question, if rhetorical. Who are you that you could hinder God? Really, who are any of us that we can hinder God?
Peter and his listeners already well knew that trying to hinder God … Read the rest
Continue reading "Three Choirs, One Song of Praise" »
Poor Thomas. He’s gotten such a bad name for nothing more than asking for reasonable verification. We might think of him as the Gospel’s first empirical scientist, and yet he’s come to be known as the doubter. That’s because subheadings in the Bible—added rather recently by translators and publishers—are interpretive. For good or ill, they … Read the rest
Continue reading "The Commissioning of the Wounded" »Easter Vigil 2019
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I do not long for resurrection. I am generally much more comfortable with death staying in its predictable tomb. And I’m pretty sure that same sentiment was true of the spice-bearing women who came to anoint the body of Jesus on a Sunday morning so very many years ago. They knew what to do … Read the rest
What do you really desire? I confess that I often don’t know. And even when I think I do know what I want, it turns out to be something quite unholy like a pint of Salt & Straw ice cream. So I find myself saying, like the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans, … Read the rest
Continue reading "The Discipline of Deeper Desire" »
Our own Honorary Canon Jim Bethell recently told me a story about visiting a crematorium and peering through the peephole that allowed him to see a human body in the process of becoming ash. His main takeaway was surprise. The body was luminous, he said. The process seemed to generate more of a glow than … Read the rest
Continue reading "Why Not Become Fire?" »
On Thursday I posted a complaint on social media that I was late in preparing my sermon. When I’m preaching I try really hard to be ready before my husband John comes home from San Francisco, because I like to save weekends for him. But this wasn’t that kind of week—everything seemed to take more time … Read the rest
Continue reading "Eye to Eye" »
If you’ve been around Trinity for a while, you may already know that my husband John and I served for seven years as missionaries in Central America and the Caribbean when we were newly married. Por eso somos hablahispanos. That’s why we’re both Spanish speakers. What you may not know is that our two sons … Read the rest
Continue reading "Light for the Journey" »
The stakes were high in Jerusalem: Jesus was within a few days of his betrayal and death, and—as Mark records it, his teaching in the Temple had become very succinct. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your … Read the rest
Continue reading "Wholehearted Sacrifice" »