Can we remember Ash Wednesday without guilt? Can Lent be an embodied, rather than ascetic season? Read more

Lectionary Reflections for Transfiguration Sunday – February 10, 2013 Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 4: 28-43 Transfiguration Sunday is a day for poetry, music, dance, delight, strobe lights, light shows, and DVDs and You Tube. Bring your iPads to share. Dazzling whiteness, glory, radiance, shining, brightness. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out like shining from shook foil; it gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil Crushed.” (Gerard Manley Hopkins) Nature is... Read more

One of my favorite films is 84 Charing Cross Road, the story of the twenty year correspondence of an American woman and a British bookseller. Completely chaste, a type of love emerges over books, shared events, and letters. Although the two correspondents never meet, there is intimacy about their relationship that exceeds that of many who live side by side and under the same roof. Antoine Saint-Exupery gives one definition of love as looking together in the same direction. This... Read more

I found Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking a great read. Of course, I may be biased. I am an introvert who makes his living moving from the quiet world of reflection and writing to an active life of lectures, retreat leadership, and marketing, not to mention preaching and teaching on a regular basis. Cain’s narratives of the challenges introverts face mirrored my own experience. It is wearing at times to be... Read more

“For we see in a mirror dimly.” This should be the motto for every theologian and lover. When it comes down to it, given the complexity of human experience and the grandeur of the universe, we don’t know much. Read more

Lectionary Reflections for the Third Sunday after Epiphany — January 27,2013 Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Psalm 19; I Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21 A newly-ordained pastor once told me that her homiletics professor counseled that one should never preach solely on the Psalms. Her professor’s admonition struck me as strange then, and seems misguided to me today insofar as the Psalms were the primary worship resource of the Jewish people, central to Christian worship, and portray the many moods of the spiritual life. Psalm 19... Read more

In Search of the Miraculous: Reflections on Miracles and the Wedding Feast at Cana Lectionary Reflections for The Second Sunday after Epiphany – January 20, 2013 John 2:1-11 Wondrous acts have been attributed to spiritual leaders, ancient and contemporary.  Gurus, shaman, and healers are, according to followers and, occasionally external observers, able to perform psychic surgery, change weather patterns, and effect physical transformations at a distance.  While typically these events occur in non-industrial environments, unsullied by the modern world view... Read more

Transforming the demonic is ultimately a work of grace, as Andrew Farley asserts in his new book Operation Screwtape. Our greatest threat is not demonic spirits or institutional evil, but our unwillingness to accept the grace of God and God’s messengers whether angelic, human, or environmental. Read more