Some of you may recognize tonight's Gospel reading as the one we heard little more than a week ago, when the lectionary assigned most of this passage for the Fifth Sunday of Lent. Rob Hirschfeld preached a wonderful sermon that morning, and being handed the same text on which to comment 8 days later leads
In last Sunday's sermon, Rob spoke of pilgrimage as an image of the Christian life. Through baptism, we are drawn into intimacy with God in Christ, and - as I once heard someone put it - even though God loves us exactly as we are, God loves us too much to let us stay the same. By the grace of…
I am not much of a fisherman. Except for a single lesson in fly fishing, my experience of fishing is limited to a few summer afternoons, when as a kid I dangled a line off the edge of a dock in a Minnesota lake and tried to snag a sunfish. I don't remember ever catching any.
You may know a…
Water into wine. When in your life have you experienced water turning into wine?
Maybe one night you have a bad sleep. You toss and turn, fretting about something that you just can't shake - maybe a financial concern, or a conflict in your family, or the increa
I can almost hear a sigh spreading across the Pioneer Valley this
morning - a sigh of relief, a sigh of rest. Whatever we did or did
not do in the countdown to Christmas - whatever cards we did or did
not send, whatever Christmas tree we did
Today is the first day of Advent,
the period that starts four Sundays before Christmas, and today we
begin a new church year. We often think of Advent as the season in
which we prepare for Christmas, and of course that's true: our English
word "Advent" comes from the Latin word for "arrival" or "coming," and…
Have you ever read a Bible passage that spoke so directly to you that it went straight to your heart like an arrow? That's what happened to me 20 years ago when I first read this morning's Old Testament story of Hannah and the birth of Samuel - or, as today's Collect puts it, when I first began to hear,…
As you know, a good number of our community is away this weekend at the Bement Camp and Conference Center, exploring what it means to be peacemakers - to live at peace within oneself, in relation to others, and in relation to the natural world. We who have stayed behind have our own chance to reflect on the way on…
I had an aha! moment a week or two ago, just as the seasons changed and we began heading into fall. I was eating supper with my husband on the porch of our home in Northampton, and as we sat there chatting about our day and digging into greens and raw vegetables that I'd picked up at the Food Bank…
A few weeks ago a reporter from the Daily Hampshire Gazette invited me to be the subject of the newspaper's weekly column "Hampshire I.D." Along with questions such as asking you to describe your funniest memory or your strangest job, the column asks you to name your favorite movie. As you might expect, I felt hon
