So if you remember the day Kennedy was shot in Dallas, 54 years ago, you really do know the world can change completely in an unexpected moment. And Advent begins with that thought, every year. Incredibly, we are urged to be prepared. But really, how can you? Utterly confounding events erase all our expectations, and all our preparations at the same time, for you cannot prepare for what you did not imagine. So really the admonition is just to live... Read more

There’s a dizzying, apocalyptic feeling in the air, in the wake of this election. And it does feel like a wake.  Our expectations, the predictions of pollsters, the urgent, dire, denunciatory final weeks of the campaign have all died away, and we are suddenly faced with a reality no one expected. What now? is the question at which everyone is grasping. And the gospel reading echoes all this. It’s the last Sunday of the year cycle, and we are facing... Read more

The reading for this week is apocalyptic.  Wars and insurrections, fighting and fear. Jesus does not speak of the end of the world, but of frightening times that will take place within our time. He says this as a corrective to the awe his friends are feeling at the ordered graceful beauty of the Great Temple of Jerusalem, God’s home among people, or so the temple teaches. Jesus says instead that their home, and God’s with them, is in their... Read more

Here we are then. Battling in the polls over an election choice between the two least likeable candidates in our history. Their unlikeability is a fact, substantiated over and over by pollsters. Their flaws are well exposed. That’s part of the problem. In general, we prefer to fall in love with candidates we don’t know too well, and then grow to know their flaws over four or eight years. And part of it is their emotional clumsiness. Neither of them... Read more

To say the least, it’s ironic that, on the Sunday before the US elections, after a more than year-long campaign in which sexual abuse has been a featured issue, the gospel reading is the one in which a group of men pose a challenge to Jesus asking whom a woman should be serving in heaven, among her seven husbands who predeceased her. Jesus answers, saying heaven isn’t like that. In heaven, he says, people neither marry nor are given in... Read more

Donald Trump has been deflecting accusations of groping an sexual assault leveled at him by an increasing number of women, by saying, Look at her. Would you believe it? I don’t think so. The point those women are making, however, is that it is Donald Trump who doesn’t look like a man they want to touch them. It is Trump who is the unattractive guy in their equation. They are asking us to hear them as they say, Look at... Read more

My friend, Karen Baker Fletcher, wrote a comment about Donald Trump, asking if evangelicals who support him are considering calling in a Catholic priest for an exorcism now. And then she says she is just joking because in her church the Prayer Warriors would be on top of this. Karen is a professor of theology at Southern Methodist University, and active in her Methodist church- she is also African American. African Americans, in my opinion, have learned more about the... Read more

In a small book called Random Acts of Kindness by Animals, there is a story about sparrows. In a street in Italy, a fallen sparrow lay helplessly. Soon many other sparrows surrounded it, trying to carry it to safety, away from the heavy traffic. A man got out of his car and waved other drivers away. Traffic then came to a standstill.  The sparrows, with great effort, managed to carry the fallen  bird to the side of the road. There... Read more

Out of sight, out of mind, says the old adage. I wonder if the corollary is also true: out of mind, out of sight. Poor Lazarus, covered with sores, lay in the gateway outside the home of the rich man, Dives, for years. And for years Dives ignored him. Ignored him so utterly that, in truth, he simply didn’t see him. He knew who Lazarus was, but was profoundly blind to Lazarus’ needs. These men are fictional, they are characters... Read more