Take today's Gospel, for example. “The kingdom of heaven is like...” Jesus begins, and off he goes into a story that looks perfectly ordinary. A landowner goes out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard, agrees with the laborers to pay them the usual daily wage, and sends them out into his vineyard to work. The day…
We grin because it's so reasonable. If someone strode down a beach, waded into the surf, and tried to walk along the surface of the sea, you and I would dismiss the person as delusional. It would be absurd: you can't do it; you can't violate the laws of physics like that. Yet here we have a story in which…
“Time for a truce with dandelions.” That is what Chet Raymo concluded, regarding the natural world, and that is what Jesus concluded, too, regarding the life of the spirit. In Matthew's parable of the weeds and the wheat, the householder's servants are eager to tear out the worthless weeds that the evil one has planted in the field. But the…
According to the story we heard from the Book of Acts, it was on Pentecost, a Jewish festival that is celebrated fifty days after Passover, that the Holy Spirit came upon the apostles with tremendous power. They couldn't have predicted when the Spirit would come, and they couldn't have known what form it would take, but they had pra
And so it is for Jesus, who has lived his entire life in a relationship of extraordinary intimacy with God. As Jesus prepares to die and to go back to the loving Creator who sent him into the world, he wants above all to convey to his friends the fact that we, too, can share in the same intimate experience…
I want to speak about reclaiming the sacredness of God's creation, but right off the bat I have to admit that at first glance the phrase may sound absurdly naïve or sentimental. The sacredness of creation? As soon as I say these words, I imagine someone wincing and I hear the wry, even cynical voices of people who say dismissive…
Earth Day fell on Good Friday this year, and rather than celebrate Creation Sunday on Easter morning, we decided to honor it today, on the Second Sunday of Easter. Now is our chance to give thanks for God's Creation and to rejoice in the holy radiance that shines in every wild and quirky creature, in every branch and blossom, in…
It is often in nature that I perceive the divine and come face to face with the glory of God, so in recent years the destruction of our life-giving and God-given eco-systems has struck me more and more as a crucial dimension of Jesus' crucifixion. The meaning of Good Friday has opened up for me: I see the earth itself…
I want to tell you right up front that I find this gesture deeply moving. Jesus is suffering unimaginable pain; he is dying; and yet his dying words are completely consonant with the life that he lived: he wants to build relationship. Even as he dies, he reaches out to these two people that he loves so much, his mother…
The passion narrative starts in a garden, where Judas betrays Jesus, and it ends in a garden, where our Lord is laid to rest: sin in the first garden, and death in the second; betrayal in the one, and burial in the other. John's Gospel clearly wants to remind us of the garden that begins the story of human sin…
