Faith in Progress

Advent 2 - Isaiah 11:1-10 Well, look who’s crashing the Christmas pageant again! Just as our 4th and 5th graders here at St. Paul’s are getting ready for next week’s Christmas pageant -- with rosy-cheeked Mary and fresh-faced shepherds and gently baa-ing lambs and feathered angels, we get grumpy John the Baptist sporting camel fur and eating locusts.  You can almost smell the fumes coming from this man who has been living in the wilderness too long. There’s no escaping John the Baptist in the season of Advent, and every year it feels funny to me that he’s the one helping us get ready for Christmas.  He was born only a handful of months before Jesus. This part of the story, with him screeching out “You brood of vipers!” won’t come for another 30 years after the nativity story.  Couldn’t we stretch out the lovely stories of the angel coming to Mary and Joseph’s dream that told them of the impending birth instead of this grumpy prophet? Or maybe we c...

Last weekend I went to a funeral that made me so glad to be an Episcopalian. The Episcopal funeral service is gorgeous.  We have beautiful prayers and hymns, lots of scripture, invitations for the congregation to join in.  And best of all, even while the funeral service mourns an end, it is also an Easter service that celebrates a new beginning. My very favorite part of the service is the opening anthems.  These are basically scripture passages about death and resurrection that are put together in a beautiful way.  They are incredibly powerful and reassuring and they really set the tone for the service. At my previous church, the clergy would walk in from the back of the church saying the opening anthems.  We’d follow behind an acolyte with a cross, if we could get one, and the casket or urn, if there was one, and sometimes the family, if they wanted to process.  Last came the clergy, saying the anthems. I’ll never forget my first time officiati...

October 13, 2019 Jeremiah 29:1-7 Last week we had Psalm 137.  A song of lament by people that have been exiled from their home land: “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered you, O Zion.” And this week, the people are still sitting by the waters of Babylon weeping in our Old Testament reading from Jeremiah.  They are still waiting for God to change their circumstances, to bring them home out of exile in a foreign land.  They are still frozen in mourning, stuck in the face of a completely uncertain future. God had set them apart as Chosen People. And now they are strangers in a strange land. God had given them the Promised Land.  And now they had lost it. And so just like last week, they must have been wondering: "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" When they asked God how they could possibly live like this, they had a certain kind of answer in mind.  They were expecting God to come and save them -- ma...

September 22, 2019 Luke 16:1-13 This summer the drive to the beach was hideous.  It usually is on summer Saturdays, but this was the worst I’d seen.  The crawl of cars wasn’t only before the Bay Bridge but all through the little confusing webs of roads on the other side too.  I probably had five times where the little lines on my GPS were so red for so long that the nice British lady inside decided it was time to rethink the whole thing.  The screen would freeze for a minute then shift a bit and the lady would say “Recalculating.” And then she would find me some slightly less painful way to go forward.   Finally, after a much longer drive than anyone was prepared for, we got to the beach and unpacked the car.  Finally it was time to head to the beach and forget the last five hours. Finally I would get to ensconce myself on my chair under the umbrella as the kids frolicked in the waves.  Finally I would get to lose myself in a great novel...