Faith in Progress

July 26, 2015 John 6:1-21 It’s good to be back here at St. Aidan’s after three weeks away!  My family was in Spain and while we didn’t get to an actual church service, we definitely went to our fair share of churches, including three cathedrals. I took the kids to walk around the Cathedral in Seville (apparently, it is the largest Gothic church in the world and the third largest church).   But it felt very museum-y.  We waited in line and paid to get inside to take pictures of Christopher Columbus’ tomb  and walk up the big tower for great views of the city.    I learned later that there was a closed-off section where they were actually having a service while we were there, but that section was walled off from visiting tourists and accessible only from the outside to locals in the know.    We felt more welcomed and more surrounded by God at the old monastery on the outskirts of Seville that had been turned into a...

June 28, 2015 Mark 5:21-43 Last week I went to a meeting of people interested in talking about how we can support the public schools and the diverse interests of the students in this area.  I’ve seen some of the struggles in our schools while serving on the PTA board at Fort Hunt and volunteering in my kids’ classrooms, and through the work we’ve been doing here at St. Aidan’s to help out with the weekend food needs of the at-risk kids.  So when Tuck Bowerfind, the rector of St. Luke’s, sent out an email seeking people to be in conversation about the needs of the schools and how the community can support the kids, I was on board.   Monday night I sat at a long table with a bunch of other folks - teachers, community leaders, clergy, and even a School Board candidate.  We introduced ourselves and talked about why we were there.  I began to see that there was a wide range of interests, from one person who wanted smaller classroom sizes, to another who w...

June 7, 2015 Genesis 3:8-15 Growing up, my sister and I often would spend time in the summer staying with my grandparents in Oregon.  Their house was magical to me.  It was small and simple but it had all the things that matter to a kid.  A comfy porch swing.  A big dining room table where we could all gather for meals and art projects and tea parties and Canasta games.   And a long second floor attic space with soft shag carpeting and dusty curtains that could be pulled to divide the room for privacy.  This attic had been where my father and his two brothers grew up, and it became the communal bedroom for whichever kids were staying there a generation later.   The dingy, un-air-conditioned attic I think used to horrify my mother.  It was really just a glorified storage area, jammed full of all the stuff that had been collected over the years.  But the stuff was so cool!  Once we discovered that a piece of the wood pa...

May 3, 2015 John 15:1-8 Ferguson felt far away.  So did Cleveland and Staten Island and Sanford.  But not Baltimore.  Freddie Gray’s death, and all that has come afterward, feels much closer to home.   I was born in Baltimore.  For my first months of life I slept on the dining room table of my parents little one-bedroom apartment downtown.  Then we moved to Columbia, about 20 minutes away, but Baltimore was always the city we claimed, like DC is now for my family.  We went to the Science Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art and Little Italy and walked around the Inner Harbor.  My dad taught at the University of Baltimore.  I even jump-roped in a half-time show or two at Orioles games. My senior prom was at one of the fancy hotels by the water.   But I never experienced Freddie Gray’s Baltimore.  Unlike Freddie Gray, who was poisoned by the lead paint in his rundown home and raised by a drug-addicted mother, I ...

April 19, 2015 Luke 24:36b-48 Are you a witness to the resurrection? I have an admission to make this third Sunday of Easter.  The truth is, there’s a lot I don’t understand about that first Easter.  I don’t understand why God couldn’t find a less violent and wrenching way of getting to Easter than Good Friday.  I don’t understand where Jesus was and what he was up to between Good Friday and Easter.   I don’t understand how it worked that Jesus died, but then suddenly was alive in a new way.  I don’t understand how he ate fish and could be physically touched by the disciples after he died.  I don’t know exactly what Easter means for us.  I’m still working on the theology of it all. And yet, I am a witness to the resurrection. About a year ago, my non-religious stepfather-in-law with no fanfare, and against the wishes of his children, gave a kidney to an acquaintance who was the minister at the church across the street from his house...

Easter 2015 -  Mark  16:1-8 “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Or from another translation: “They got out as fast as they could, beside themselves, their heads swimming. Stunned, they said nothing to anyone.” That is IT, my friends.  That is the true last line of the Gospel of Mark.  No post-resurrection walks or breakfasts with Jesus, no sudden appearances in locked rooms, no heartfelt talks.  Mark leaves us dangling - with the women frozen in shock and fear and silence.  Mark is not about to let us mindlessly read our cheery Easter Gospel and move on to our Easter egg hunts and ham dinners. Unsurprisingly, later readers couldn’t stand Mark’s ending, and so hundreds of years later they added another ending that throws in an assurance that the women actually did spread the news about what they saw, plus a few meetings with the raised Je...