A reflection on the lectionary readings for Sunday, July 5th In the spring and fall and sometimes the summer my wife and I love to go backpacking. We enjoy the quiet of long miles on the trail, the beauty of God’s creation, and the simplicity of living from a backpack. But if we admit it, another pleasure of backpacking is getting outfitted for the trip. Before we head to the woods we lay out our equipment, an array of compact... Read more
This is the text of a sermon preached at the Church of the Epiphany in Washington D.C. on June 14, 2015. The readings were for Proper 6, Year B. When you hear the name Jesus what words comes to mind? Wise. Loving. Caring. Peaceful. Savior. God… One word we could wait for all day and never hear is “funny.” We tend to think of Jesus as a kind of other worldly mystic, well beyond a joke and a sense of... Read more
Among the many roots of the season of Lent is the remembrance that Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness at the beginning of his ministry. As we enter into our own 40 days of discipline, it would be good to ask what, exactly, Jesus was going out to the desert to do? The answers in the history of interpretation are varied. To fast, to pray, to reflect—those were certainly among Jesus’s activities, but to what purpose? The best answers... Read more
If you want to see hell on earth do an image search for “Alberta Tar Sands.” You’ll see Boreal forests in the great Canadian wilds savaged into some kind of alien landscape beyond any recognition of a creation God called “very good.” Deep craters spiral down to black rock, pools of water filled with the heavy metals of mine waste. Nothing lives here—it is a landscape dominated by machines, bulldozer tracks and massive mining vehicles with monster truck tires. The... Read more
My daughter and I stood in line, our reflections curved in the glass of the pastry case. It was Monday, back to work day for most, and the coffee shop was full. Retirees sat at big tables swapping stories and headphone wearing remote workers huddled in the corners, faces reflecting the blue hue of laptop screens. The man ahead of us came up to the cashier. They knew each other (this is the kind of place where half the people... Read more
We had to go to the basement to see her—off the escalator and to the left, the docent had told us. There was none of the dark, evocative lighting of the dinosaurs, the fun electric interactivity of the insect displays, the hushed wonder of the gems. Here were the recently extinct birds of North America—two small display cases under fluorescent lights, tucked in the extra space between two gifts shops and a museum café at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural... Read more
I’ve been cycling a lot lately, the spandex, sunglasses and shaved-legs kind, yes, but also the get around town kind. To the coffee shop, to the store, to school—if I’m going someplace by myself I do my best to get there by bike. One particular stretch I ride regularly has newly striped bike lanes—lanes that didn’t come without protest from a handful of residents on the busy street. Essentially, the question came down to whether streets are for cars and... Read more
The oldest heresies in Christianity have been those that have denied the body—Christ’s body, our bodies. Gnosticism is a name that applies to a good many of them, Docetism another. The idea is that God is too great to have taken on a human body and that the material realities of our body are too lowly to be welcomed into the eternal kingdom of God. The Docetists said that Christ appeared to be human but that he didn’t have real... Read more
We don’t have many secrets these days nor do we keep them, our own or others. We should. Secrecy is a spiritual discipline, a key companion to humility and truth telling and prayer. Jesus kept secrets and taught his disciples to do the same. Matthew 6:1-21 concerns the keeping of secrets, the doing of things in secret. Prayer, fasting, alms should all be secret more often than not. The kind of wealth we accumulate should be the kind that can... Read more
This post is a part of the ongoing Patheos Book Club discussion on Mark Scandrette’s Free: Spending Your Time and Money on What Matters Most. I like Mark Scandrette. Just his term “Jesus dojo” has animated my imagination for years and that’s not to speak of the practices and experiments in Christianity he brings to what can be a stayed and stale religion. Scandrette is always able to write books that offer a serious answer to Jesus’ calls and yet also... Read more
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