How did the angel come to Mary? Did Gabriel come in a rush of wings, like a gust of wind suddenly blowing in through the window? Or did the angel come as gently as snow, quietly approaching from the garden or descending from above, drawing near so silently that Mary had to look up, she had to turn her head:…
My son Sam is fifteen, and he's been asports fan all his life. In the summer, he follows baseball, and whenhe was a kid, I'd hear him shout, "The Red Sox rule!" In thefall, because his father grew up in Wisconsin, Sam would announce withgreat satisfaction, "The Green Bay Packers rule!" I alwayssmiled when I heard the exuberance i
What do you make of today's Gospel? It's a prickly one, no doubt about it, complete with a raging king who sends out his troops to burn down a city and later commands his attendants to bind an unfortunate man without a wedding robe and "throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth"…
Today is September 11, 2005, four years to the day after September 11, 2001, and the end of a week in which once again we've been shocked by images of extraordinary violence and suffering on American soil. This time it wasn't New York but New Orleans. This time it wasn't crashing airplanes and falling towers but crashing waves and falling…
Today’s parable of the sower brings me back to a crystal-clear summer morning many years ago. I am standing in the hallway by the front door, trying to get everything organized so that my son will arrive on time for his first day of summer camp. The lunch-box is ready with the foods that this particular seven-year-old will be likely…
My name is Margaret Bullitt-Jonas and I am an Episcopal priest. I speak as a Christian, and faith tells me that we stand here in the presence of the God who loved us and all Creation into being. According to the sacred story, God made human beings from earth, breathes life into our nostrils, and charges us to care for…
What would it be like to be so fired with a vision of God’s justice and mercy that you just couldn’t help but speak about it? What if your experience of God was so vivid and so visceral that you couldn’t contain it, couldn’t keep it to yourself, but you had to express it, had to share it, had to…
I can't remember a spring in New England that I've savored with more delight than this one. After a long, hard winter, how sweet it's been to watch colors rise to the surface, to see forsythia and then magnolia, crabapple and now dogwood trees bursting into bloom, to look up at the hills of the Holyoke Range and see a…
Along with - literally - something like half a billion people around the world, this weekend we're celebrating Earth Day. Today is Creation Sunday - a day for giving thanks to God for the extraordinary mystery and miracle of God's Creation. And it's a day for sober reflect
I’d like to say a few words about the disciple we remember as Doubting Thomas. Someone once said that two sorts of people please God: those who serve God with all their heart because they know God, and those who seek God with all their heart because they don’t know God. Most of us have probably spent t
