Hate is as all-absorbing as love, as irrational, and in its own way as satisfying. As lovers thrive on the presence of the beloved, haters revel in encounters with the one they hate. They confirm him in all his darkest suspicions. They add fuel to all his most burning...
01577 – A Strange Scene
It is as strange a scene as there is in the Gospels... It was Jesus of Nazareth all right, the man they'd tramped many a dusty mile with, whose mother and brothers they knew, the one they'd seen as hungry, tired, footsore as the rest of them. But it was also the...
01470 – Preaching Both Comedy and Tragedy
Switching on the lectern light and clearing his throat, the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them of the truth and because Jesus speaks them both, blessed be he. The preacher tells the truth by speaking of the...
01455 – Metaphor for Advent
Advent is like the hush in a theatre just before the curtain rises. It is like the hazy ring around the winter moon that means the coming of snow which will turn the night to silver.
01365 – Give Life for Love’s Sake
The life you clutch, hoard, guard, and play safe with is in the end a life worth little to anybody, including yourself, and only a life given away for love's sake is a life worth living. from Listening to Your Life
01359 – Telling Human Secrets
I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human. from Telling Secrets
01335 – Sex & Society
Our society is filled with people for whom the sexual relationship is one where body meets body but where person fails to meet person.
01260 – Don’t Risk Losing Touch with God
The God of biblical faith is the God who meets us at those moments in which for better or worse we are being most human, most ourselves, and if we lose touch with those moments, if we don’t stop from time to time to notice what is happening to us and around us and...
01237 – The Place God To Which God Calls You
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
01080 – What Happened?
We don’t really know what happened at the moment of the Ascension, just as we don’t know exactly what happened when Jesus left the tomb in which he had been buried. We do know that he was never recognized by sight, but only by voice, or in the breaking of bread, or...