February 25, 2018 - Lent 2B

Lectionary Readings

Almighty God, guide us to seek your Truth: come whence it may, cost what it will, lead where it might. Amen.

            Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.” Certainly, those words apply to today’s text from Mark. Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” It doesn’t take a seminary degree to understand what that means. It’s direct, clear, unambiguous, inescapable, and also really difficult. It has been said that “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”

February 18, 2018 - Lent 1B

Lectionary Readings

Almighty God, guide us to seek your Truth: come whence it may, cost what it will, lead where it might. Amen.

February 14, 2018 - Ash Wednesday

Lectionary Readings; Psalm 51

In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

            St. Anselm once wrote, “You have not considered the weight of sin.” Obviously, we were not the audience he had in mind, but the shoe fits. Ash Wednesday is a day on which we, more intently than we usually do, focus on sin. One of the questions that I often get as a priest is “What does it mean to sin?” The question behind the question is often “So, I did this thing, how bad is it?” If we are going to consider sin today, we need to have a working definition to start from.

February 11, 2018 - Last Epiphany B

Lectionary Readings

In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

            Do you remember the first time you looked through a microscope? You put something, like a butterfly wing or a flower petal, onto a slide, adjusted the light, and then peered through the lens and a whole new world was opened to you. What you saw was something that is normally hidden from us, but undergirds everything about our world. And though it’s the opposite scale, the first time you looked through a telescope lens you could see things that are much bigger than ourselves. I remember the spine-tingling sense of wonder that I was overcome with when I looked through a telescope and saw the awe-inducing rings of Saturn. Whether it’s a microscope or a telescope, these tools reveal to us beauty, wonder, and truths of which we are typically unaware. The event known as the Transfiguration, which we heard about in Mark this morning, is a Biblical story that is equivalent to looking through a microscope to see the deepest truths of our world and a telescope to be overwhelmed by the glory of it all.

February 4, 2018 - Epiphany 5B

Lectionary Readings

In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

            “Have you not known? Have you not heard?” That refrain is found in our reading from Isaiah this morning and it sets the stage for considering the passage from Mark this morning. The fact that Isaiah asks those questions about having known and heard assumes that it would be easy to miss the salvation of God that he is talking about. The same can happen to us – we get so wrapped up in the busyness of our day-to-day routines, we get caught up in the news, or we get stuck in the specifics of our own crises that we might forget about God’s salvation for us.