March 25, 2018 - Palm Sunday B

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

            We have an anger problem in our society. A few weeks ago, I was driving our girls to daycare. I was heading into town on Innes Street and was driving through Catawba College, through the 25 mile-an-hour zone. Well, for the man in the pick-up truck behind me, that wasn’t nearly fast enough. So I drove through the campus with him about a foot behind my bumper, watching him screaming and gesturing at me. When I turned off Innes, a barrage of horn beeps sent me on my way. This wasn’t just another incident of an aggressive driver, as I was actually worried that he was going to follow me to the parking lot of the daycare to confront me. The disturbing part of this incident is that this sort of interaction is common in our society. We have an anger problem.

March 4, 2018 - Lent 3B

Lectionary Readings

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

            If you’ve ever been to a big sporting event, you know that the television crew has a huge trailer that they park in front of the stadium to broadcast the game. It’s essentially a mobile production office and coming out of the trailer are dozens of thick wires that connect to all of the various aspects of making the broadcast happen – satellite dishes, cameras, microphones, generators. Now imagine someone coming along who happens to believe that college football has become corrupt. And this person takes a pair of hedge trimmers and cuts every single cord coming out of that trailer. Would we call this incident “the cleansing of the broadcast?” I don’t think so. Why, then, do we refer to this event in the Gospel as the “cleansing of the Temple?”

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.