Acts 2:14a, 22-32 John 20:19-31 There is a cute scene in the middle of The Sound of Music, when Maria and Georg first express their love for each other. They are sharing their memories of the moment when they each knew they loved the other one. When I was little, I thought it was embarrassing, but as an adult I think it is my favorite scene. Don’t we just love to remember exactly when something good first began? The moment I knew I loved you. The moment I knew I wanted to be a mother, or a father. The moment our friendship began. These are moments that stick in our memory and we visit them now and then, for the pleasure of them. The moment when we experienced the beginning of a new thing – a life-changing thing. Occasionally, the new thing is really big, bigger than a personal relationship […]

Matthew 28:1-10 Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed. Powerful words we say to one another on Easter morning. But only powerful because we know the story behind it  – a story that gives meaning to everything. The particular story of this day is the one about the women who came to the tomb early. They came to tend the body of their beloved, but it was gone. The tomb was empty. Angels appeared and said to the women, “He is risen; you will see him again in Galilee, the place where it all began.” It goes back to Galilee, where his ministry began. But there is much more to it than that, isn’t there? It goes back to Bethlehem, where he was born – this child called Immanuel, God with us. Because God so loved the world. It goes back to Bethlehem. But it goes back much further, doesn’t […]

Matthew 21:1-11  We wrapped up our Bible study for the season last Wednesday. We made it all the way through the Old Testament, from Genesis to Malachi. It really felt like an accomplishment. I kind of wished I had special t-shirts to hand out, saying something like “I Survived the Old Testament Bible Study.” In our last session we spent some time in the later prophets, those with a very far ranging vision – those prophets who speak of God’s ultimate intention for the world. One of these is Zechariah, who gets an honorable mention today. These visionary prophets were living and writing during a time when it seemed like something big was afoot, cosmic shifts were imminent. These were the centuries just before Jesus was born. I think it must have felt like the world was about to change. It was. Most people, though, had no idea why – […]

Ezekiel 37:1-14 John 11:1-45 I remember the time one of my kids decided to run a marathon. He didn’t just lace up his shoes one morning and go out to the starting line. He prepared. He followed a rigorous training plan – a very impressive one. So, he thought he was ready for it, and I did too. But it was harder than he expected it to be.  He told me later that at a certain point, he was in so much pain with every step he could barely go on. In distance running they call that “hitting the wall,” when the pain and fatigue are overpowering.  I have heard it said that it’s like your body and your mind are having a conversation.  Your body says, “Look, you’ve had me out here for hours, running hard.  I am really, really hurting right now so I think we should just […]

Ephesians 5:8-14 John 9:1-41  [Note about the text: There are many players in this story of Jesus healing the young man with blindness, and it should be noted that all of them are Jews. This is important because at one point in the story we are told that the young man’s parents are “afraid of the Jews.”  When John writes this he is speaking to the church that existed decades later, at the time he was writing. Many years after Jesus was crucified, his disciples were expelled from their Jewish community, which was very painful for them. From that perspective, this is a story about the pain of feeling excluded, perhaps the pain of being unseen.] I don’t know if it is accurate to call this the story of Jesus healing a blind man. Maybe it should be called a story about all the ways people take issue with Jesus […]

John 4:5-42 We are in the third week of our Lenten journey now, and I am thinking about the ways in which journeys to new places may change us. In my morning devotions last week I encountered some questions pertaining to this. How does what you encounter today affect your actions today, and tomorrow? How do the experiences you have now change the way you will be later? Questions such as these seem to get at the bigger question of whether, and how, you will be open to a new thing when it is presented to you. To the extent that we can afford to, many of us attempt to travel in a way that will be as unchallenging as possible. In many ways, we try to take home with us when we go away, to keep it as familiar and comfortable as we can. But then are we able […]

Genesis 12:1-4 John 3:1-17 All of us have moments when we do impulsive things. Like, when your friend says, “Let’s go out for ice cream!” and you weren’t planning to do that, you were actually planning to go home and do laundry, but then you thought, “Ice cream? Why not? You only live once, right?” We have all done something impulsive once in a while. But probably not leaving your home and walking off toward an unknown destination. I’ll bet you haven’t done that. I wonder what Abram thought when God called him to walk away from his home and his people and go to a place God would show him.  There must have been something – or a few things – on his mind. But we don’t know.  The text doesn’t say.  It just says that Abram went, as the Lord told him. I try to imagine why. Maybe […]

Matthew 4:1-11 Lent began four days ago on Ash Wednesday. We gathered together to remember our sin and our mortality and received ashes. I said the words, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return. And people thanked me for saying so, which always feels a little funny to me. But I do the same. When I receive the ashes smeared on my forehead in the shape of a cross, and hear these words, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” I say, “thank you.” Maybe it’s because we already know it deep within us, and it feels right to hear the truth spoken out loud every once in a while. We are small in the large scheme of things. A small speck of dust in a vast wilderness. We need to find a power greater than our own to navigate this journey. The Israelites […]

Matthew 5:21-37 When I was a young child I loved the TV show Romper Room. Miss Delores or Miss Marjorie or Miss Nancy, or some other Miss, would sing a little song about two bees, a Do-Bee and a Don’t-Bee, to teach lessons about good behavior. “I always do what’s right; I never do anything wrong. I’m a Romper Room Do-Bee, a Do-Bee all day long.” I was all on board with this, being a Do-Bee. Romper Room Lady had all my attention, my complete loyalty. My grandmother would tease me about this, though. She would sing, “I always do what’s wrong; I never do anything right.” And I always reacted the same way, utterly scandalized that she would mock the idea of the Do-Bee. She would just laugh, tickled pink. It never got old – poking at my little four-year-old prissiness. I just thought it was important to be […]

Matthew 5:13-20 One of my favorite films of all time is It’s a Wonderful Life. We never used to call it by the title, though. In our home when the kids were young, it was just “George Bailey.” We watched it so many times, we knew it so well, you could just stick the VHS tape in the player and let it play from wherever it was stopped the last time we played it. Kira, as a little girl, liked to do just that. A little George Bailey to unwind at the end of a tough day at kindergarten was just the thing. It didn’t take much to do the trick. George Bailey is a man who has lived a very ordinary life. He’s never been anywhere, never done anything really special. And then one evening he is feeling like whatever luck he had has run out. His life, he […]