CAN’T WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING MORE PLEASANT?

Roz Chast, one of my favorite cartoonists whose work is published in The New Yorker magazine, wrote a memoir of her life with her aging parents as together they dealt with the painful decisions surrounding aging and moving from a cherished home and...

A Prayer of Hope

There are ChristiansWho have hysterical reactionsAs if the world had slipped out of God's hands.They are violentAs if they were risking everything. But we believe in history.The world is not a roll of the diceOn its way toward chaos.A new world has begun to...

Losing and Finding

This year my Lenten discipline took a different turn. I decided that I would feel my feelings and come to name them. This is no small task because I, like many of us, often live noticing only a small band of emotion. Fear, anger, sadness, happiness come readily....

Lent is a Pilgrimage in Time

This Sunday St. Stephen's will have the privilege of hosting the Very Reverend Dr. David Monteith, the 40th Dean of Caterbury (post Reformation) Cathedral at our forum in the Havens Center at 9:30 and as our preacher at the 10:30 a.m. Eucharist. Canterbury...

Silence in the Presence of the Holy

One of my joys of coming out of COVID is that I get to go to movie theatres again and see films on the big screen. I love being enveloped by the darkness, surrounded by the sound. Films take me out of my world and transport me to another place and...

Prophets Say Words We Don’t Want to Hear

See, the Lord GOD comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. Isaiah 40:11 There are so many words and concepts that we use in church or Scripture study that we don’t use in other contexts: “redemption,”...

This is the Way the World Ends

When I was a young evangelical Christian, I was terrified by prospects of the end of the world. From my Bible reading I heard about Jesus coming like a thief in the night, as a consuming fire. When the Yom Kippur war broke out in Israel in 1973, I was sure Armageddon...

Sobriety As a Practice of Thanksgiving

But you, beloved, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness. So then let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober; for...

A House for All Sinners and Saints

While a House for All Sinners and Saints was the name of the parish served by Nadia Bolz-Weber (a public pastor and theologian), it could also serve as the name for every Christian congregation. Churches are not composed of only one type of person. Each and everyone...

What Happens When the Language of Peace Gets Censored?

As violence in Israel and Gaza escalates, including the bombing of a hospital which killed hundreds of Palestinians this week, U. S. State Department officials are censoring how their employees describe what is happening. According to a report in the Huffington Post...

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