This Sunday, January 10 (the Sunday after Epiphany and 9 days post New Year’s Day), I want to invite you on an epiphanal journey with me for the next three Sundays: “Happy New Year — The Uncertain Tour!”
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I wrote this parable some years ago. It’s adapted from a riddle I’d heard as a kid. Only now has it begun to make sense to me. I hope it offers a window of illumination and inspiration for you this season of Advent in a time of COVID.
Anger, frustration, is an insidious fact of life. We’re wired for it, so that all it takes is a trigger and we’re off. And therein lies a conundrum.
Christian living is living moment to moment as an expression of Shalom — an average day like any other day (which, to clarify, is always a God-moment waiting to be discovered!)
Much of what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount (as with most of his life and teachings) was unexpected and contrary to popular perceptions.
Sometimes it takes a crisis (a crisis of faith, of relationship, of conscience, of disconnection) to open up the familiar in order to reveal something more authentic and healing in the unfamiliar.
“What is the greatest joy in life?” John asked me after soundly beating me during one of our annual games of racquetball. I figured it was a trick question, so I joked, “A double cheeseburger with a plate of onion rings and a beer?”
This Sunday, I am beginning a new series entitled, “Peace in the Broken: Living with the Question.” How might questions widen our faith in ways that connect us more deeply with our lives, with life around us, and with the very source of our being?
This is “Labor Day Sunday,” and our reality is decidedly different in CoVid/2020 — our encounters with others significantly more limited, socially distanced, and mostly masked. We’re all a little more anxious, and life much more unpredictable.
This Sunday, Rev. Linda McDermott and I will finish our series as we explore the final virtue that we might practice as a way of bringing more hope to times that seem otherwise — the virtue of Adventurous Civility. When you least expect to find hope in an abusive, scary world, civility calls out our wildest possibilities.