Abraham’s Three Divine Guests, 551 AD. Basilica di S. Vitale, Ravenna, Italy. Vanderbilt Divinity School Library, Art in the Christian Tradition. In the gospel lesson for this week, Jesus is sending 70 disciples out to preach in his name. And he promises them that, if any town refuses to welcome them, “it will be more tolerable for Sodom than for that town.” Last week in Sacramento, CA, Baptist preacher Roger Jimenez said that Orlando was a safer place with 50... Read more

Jesus does not equivocate about the cost of becoming a disciple. Neither is the Way he offers a sentimental path.  The road leads on. Never back. It is the discipline of walking on that he requires. Luke writes that a community Jesus dearly loved, the Samaritans, meant to join him as followers, until he told them he was going into a place they abhored – Jerusalem, where the Temple and the priestly liturgy associated with it had always hated Samaritans,... Read more

There’s so much at work in the story of this last week and the Orlando shootings. An angry young man, with a record of violent acts and words as far back as third grade.  And these angry young men seem to be everywhere, firing away in a Colorado cinema, a San Bernadino office party, a Bible study class in Charleston, a Connecticut first grade classroom, and a popular nightclub in Orlando. In Orlando, a mixed-up mess of a man, a... Read more

The young madman in Geresea pours out torrents of raging suspicion. Loudly and ceaselessly, he will not be calmed. He has been this way for a prolonged time. His despairing neighbors have chained him in the cemetery, to give themselves some rest, some scrap of peace of mind. His raging can still be heard, but with less volume. The fame of him, of what we would likely call his enduring psychotic rage, has spread far and wide. Jesus crosses the... Read more

The media shocker of the moment is Brock Turner, a 20 year old white Ohioan who was smart enough to get into Stanford and athletic enough to have his heart set on the Olympics, but dumb enough, one night when he got drunk to pull a woman, also drunk, behind a trash bin when she who passed out, and see this as an opportunity for rape. Two sober Swedish grad students, Carl-Fredrik Arndt and Peter Jonsson, cycling by, saw Turner... Read more

Women in priestly robes. Women in clerical collars. Women in collars opening local meetings with prayers. Women Bishops. Women bestowing sacraments: pronouncing marriage; forgiveness; eucharist; the belovedness of baptism. These images, these experiences, would help to remove the icon of females as subservient, as slaves, as property of husbands and fathers, as never to rise above menial work and not deserving of education. These icons rule vast numbers of women in much of the world. If the Vatican were to... Read more

He fought 64 bouts in his career, and was only knocked down in one of them. But it was his bouts with the heavy weights outside the ring, who tried their best to knock him down and keep him out that have made him a hero for the ages. He exchanged his birth name, Cassius, a slave name, for the name of the prophet of Islam, the faith to which he converted early in his career. It was a faith... Read more

We value honesty. Transparent lives. People who are open books. We ache to find these qualities, in lovers and leaders, in classmates and co-workers, in family and friends. And we know there are crooks and con artists out there. I’m wary.  A lot more than I used to be. I get the daily email – sometimes two – from someone in a third world country, a ‘widow’, a ‘lawyer’, a ‘business agent’, who wants to give me tens of millions... Read more

Memory. It is a main work of faith, of all faiths really, to remember. To carry forward stories of the relationship between God and people, stories of how blessing came to light the shadows of sorrow, sickness, shame. It is memory that carries the light by which people find their way home, even in strange places and dark times. The season of Pentecost begins with a memory of Jesus, healing a man he had never met, who was a slave... Read more