Many things might be said of the first five weeks of the administration of Donald Trump, the 45th president of the USA, but it appears that chaos and confusion are high on such a list. “Alternative facts” might be the hallmark of a crowd that has difficulty telling the truth of things (a recent poll suggested that fully 2/3 of the public pronouncements of the president are “pants-on-fire” lies!), still the more basic characteristic is chaos. A National Security Director... Read more

(Lectionary for March 1, 2017–Ash Wednesday) And so, here we go again. Another Ash Wednesday where we smudge up our foreheads with some inky black, ashy watery mixture, stand solemnly and sing quietly with our fellow smudgees, file slowly into the night, home to wash our faces. For women this ancient action merely adds to the makeup they regularly use; the ablution afterwards is nothing different than usual for them. For men, the addition to their craggy faces is different,... Read more

Our 45th president of the USA, Donald J. Trump, is a master of announcing and repeating lies, falsehoods easily disproved by the click of a computer key. How long, O Lord, will we need to hear that his electoral victory was the largest in recent history? In fact it was not, as a simple on-line search will readily reveal. How long must we be regaled with reports of the vast size of his inaugural crowds, far larger than those of... Read more

( Lectionary for February 26, 2017) Because we are again about to enter the season of Lent, prefigured as always by Transfiguration Sunday, I have decided to leave the Psalms and return to the more traditional lectionary passages from the Hebrew Bible for my reflections for the foreseeable future. However, I must say that Exodus 24 is anything but calmly traditional. It is at the same time a very ancient bit of Israelite worship and an important prelude to the... Read more

A wag said one time—and though I know not the wag, I have used the words time and again—“It is often said that the Bible teaches that we should be like Abraham or Joseph or David; I to the contrary say that the Bible teaches you are like Abraham or Joseph or David. Now, what do you plan with the help of God to do about it?” The fact is that any reading of our Bible, even a cursory one,... Read more

(Lectionary for February 19, 2017) This week brings us back to Psalm 119, at least to a later part of it. As I noted last week, this very long poem is a vast acrostic. That means that each successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet forms the first letter of each verse of an entire section of the piece. The example today is the letter “he;” all eight verses of this portion of the psalm begins with the letter he. Such... Read more

I have decided as of today that I would use characters from the Bible as a mirror for the actions and behaviors of our new president of the USA, Donald Trump, in a series of articles I am calling “The Bible as Mirror.” Last week I used the weird story of Elisha and the bears as a way of thinking about just how thin-skinned our new leader is. In the same way that Elisha allowed a few young children to... Read more

( Lectionary for February 12, 2017) Many religious people in the 21st century focus much of their hope for their faith on the desire to be happy. In a depressing and despairing world, they say, I just want to be happy. Is that really too much to ask? The religion I grew up with, goes the common cry, was so much a downer, so much talk of sin, especially sex and booze, and what I ought not be doing. But... Read more

I once challenged a preaching class I was teaching to preach a sermon based on an especially notorious text: 2 Kings 2:23-25. Believe me, this text occurs in no lectionary, save a possible collection of readings that all wish had not found their way into the scripture! Surely, you know this one. Let me paraphrase the context by way of summary. Elisha, newly chosen successor of the great Elijah, who has just made a most dramatic exit from the world... Read more

  (Lectionary for February 5, 2017) A quick and facile reading of Ps. 112 may lead one to shout something like, “Fat chance, dude! Just what world are you living in?” In the world I know, far too many righteous folk, at least those judged to be righteous by biblical standards, are too often not “remembered forever” (Ps. 112:6), their descendants are too often not “mighty in the land” (Ps. 112:2), they too often do not “look with triumph on their... Read more