Faith in Progress

December 25, 2016 John 1:1-14 This year I’ve been doing a preaching fellowship at the seminary.  We have monthly small peer group meetings and a couple residencies scattered throughout the year where we all gather together.  Our main leader/teacher/mentor is the preaching professor at Virginia Theological Seminary, Ruthanna Hooke.  Her background is in theatre, so one of her main pushes is always to have us find ways to expand our preaching so it isn’t just about theology and research and careful wording but also about our whole selves, including our bodies.  And so all kinds of interesting and surprising things are part of our time together.  Yoga, improv, good snacks.  And lots of body and voice techniques.   She has us take deep breaths and sigh out noisily, sometimes while letting our heads fall forward.  Or she'll have us stretch out as far as we can and then relax different sections of our bodies.  Or we'll hum from d...

November 13, 2016 Isaiah 65:17-25 If you feel like you’re teetering on the edge of an abyss right now, if you’re having trouble seeing anything but darkness — Take heart.  We’ve been here before.  In the beginning, in the very beginning, before God created the heavens and the earth, there was chaos.  One of my favorite renderings of the creation story puts it this way, “Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness.”  And over the chaos of this watery abyss, God’s Spirit brooded. In the beginning, everything was tumult and messiness and darkness, and God sat right there over it for a while, just brooding.  But then God breathed.  And God began to imagine.  And God began to bring life out of the chaos.  And even before creation was finished, even while the life and light were just beginning to show through, God was able to see and pronounce the goodness that was there: “It is good,” God promised.  Eve...

October 23, 2016 Luke 18:9-14   I‘m guessing we can probably all agree that this election seems to have brought our country to a time of crisis, though we might disagree about what makes it that way.   For me, it is almost unimaginable that a candidate for president of the United States excuses boasting about sexual assault with “locker room talk.”   But that’s really just the straw that broke the camel’s back.   We have become so polarized, and not just on the usual political issues, but on gender and race and religion and ethnicity.   It has been hard to watch us fall apart.     Given all that’s brewing in the world, at our monthly local Episcopal clergy lunch, someone asked how we were talking about this election in our congregations.  Several clergy spoke about how carefully they were balancing their words to speak about civility and love so as to reach but not offend Trump supporters in their congregations.  I was surprised....

Today we’re celebrating the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi.   Usually our annual celebration of Francis takes place during a short, outdoor pet blessing in the afternoon,  but I’d been longing to try having the pets included in the Church service instead, like the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City where they bring in animals from the Central Park Zoo to bless every year.    No camels or kangaroos here, but still pretty exciting.   Luckily for these pets, we’re used to a little wildness and restlessness with our small human animals at this service, so they stand a good chance of fitting in. It’s a crazy idea, bringing animals into the church.  Much less bringing them in for a regular service.  There’s no telling what will happen.  The dogs might start barking at each other, or terrorizing the cats.  One of them might try to escape.  The poor kids like mine with no pets of their own might freak out.  So...

September 18, 2016 Jeremiah 8:18-9:1 There was a choice of psalms today.  One was Psalm 113 - a very pretty psalm, full of joy and promise and thanks and praise for God.  And then there was Psalm 79, the one we read a little bit ago.  You might have noticed that it was not so pretty and joyful.  It was full of anger and pain and violence and questioning.  Our tradition at St. Aidan’s is that the preacher gets to pick if there is a choice of readings.  No question!  I told Eileen “ definitely Psalm 113 - the other one is dreadful!” And then I started delving into our reading from Jeremiah.  Jeremiah is known as the “weeping prophet.”  He was teaching and preaching during a time when the Israelites were in exile.  Their enemies were destroying them.  They were far from the security of Jerusalem and the majesty of the temple and they were constantly tempted to give up on God and each other. And so our reading is heavy....

August 21, 2016 Luke 13:10-17 We came home yesterday from a week at the beach in Delaware and the theme of the week for me was perspective. It began the very first night, when I took the kids down to play at the beach.  Holden had to drive separately, so it was just me.  3 kids, 1 adult, lifeguard off duty, and a whole lot of waves.  That was when I realized two things about waves.  Number 1 - Apparently waves look much bigger and scarier to parents than they do to kids.  I remember when I was a kid and the bigger the wave, the better.  I'd ride them to shore, sometimes getting swooped but just getting back up again and running back into the waves.  Now, as a parent, the waves just keep rolling in and all I can think is that every single wave is a potential drowner of my children.  Parents and children have a different perspective on waves.  And Number 2 - when you look out into the vastness of the ocean, It is very hard to tell t...