Year A; Lent 4; 3.15.2020 (St. Paul’s is closed and this service includes only two EM’s, musician and me) John 4:5-42 Today, here in the St. Paul’s beautiful Nave, Brunswick, Maine. We are a small group leading “virtual worship.” We have set our chairs six feet apart from each other. We are practicing “social […]
Year A; Lent 2; 3.8.2020 John 3:1-17 Nicodemus! I love this guy! A learned, upstanding religious official lurking in the darkness like a teenager meeting with Jesus in secret so “the popular kids” wouldn’t see how serious he was. I first fell in love with him in the 1970s Franco Zeffirelli mini-series, “Jesus of […]
Year A; Ash Wednesday; 2.26.2020 My roommate in college was from a teeny-tiny town in north central Kansas. She was a legacy in our sorority. Her name was Mary. Her mother and three sisters were all in the same sorority. In my day in college, sorority girls wore make-up and dressed stylishly. In my […]
Year A; The Last Sunday After the Epiphany; 2.23.2020 Matthew 17:1-9 The Transfiguration Many of you know that I grew up in Kansas City, Kansas. It is on the eastern border of the state of Kansas. Missouri was only a few miles east. But, my family treated the western border of our state as […]
Year A; Epiphany 6; 2.16.2020 I Corinthians 3:1-9 One of the sites I’ll be visiting during my sabbatical this summer is the ancient city of Corinth. Christians know Corinth as one of the communities the Apostle Paul founded. Even those not familiar with Christianity might have heard about the Corinthians at a wedding when […]
Year A; The Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple; 2.2.2020, (Candlemas); Luke 2:22-40 One of the very first pastoral calls I made as a priest to a dying person was to the hospital bedside of Harry Cutchen. Ginny, his spouse, called to say he was dying. This was in Rocky Mount, […]
Year A Epiphany 3; 1.26.2020, Annual Meeting Matthew 4:12-23 “Tu has venido a la orilla” “Lord, you have come to the lakeshore.” This was the very favorite hymn of the Spanish speaking Saturday night congregation at Grace Church, Plainfield, New Jersey. They loved to sing it and sang it every week to the music […]
Year A; Epiphany 2; 1.19.2020 Isaiah 49:1-7; Martin Luther King, Jr. During my trip to Atlanta after Christmas to see my sister, we visited the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. On the lower level there is an exhibit of some of the documents of Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr.’s life from […]
Year A; The Baptism of our Lord; Epiphany 1; 1.12.2020 Matthew 3:13-17 Last summer during my visit to San Diego to see my sister, I had several “play dates” with my niece and her two little daughters. During a somewhat slow afternoon one day, I spied in the corner of my niece’s living room […]
Year A; Christmas Day; 12.25.2019 John 1:1-14 On Christmas Eve last night we heard the story of the birth of Jesus from Luke’s gospel. The story has the feel of a specific place in history: a mighty Roman emperor with a name, Augustus, a specific governor, Quirinius in a specific territory, Syria. There is […]