Faith in Progress

February 2, 2020 Presentation of Jesus in the Temple Luke 2:22-40 My kids had Monday and Tuesday off school this past week for teacher work days, so I decided to take them skiing.  None of us are very good, so we started off slow on the bunny trail. Once we graduated from that, we started trying out the different beginner trails.   One trail required us to ski across a long section of what looked at first like fairly flat land to get to the slope.  As we were laboriously hauling ourselves across using our poles, we noticed people coming towards us were holding on to handles connected to a rope tow.  We thought it looked like great fun - a way to move a little faster without all the effort. It seemed very unjust that the rope tow only moved in one direction, but we looked forward to trying it on our way back.  We had finally mastered getting off the ski lift without landing in a tangled mess, so how hard could holding onto a rope be?  ...

January 12, 2020 Matthew 3:13-17 In my previous life, as many of you know, I was a lawyer.  I did several brief stints as a summer associate at big law firms.  Which is, or was in the late 90s anyway, a pretty great life. Not too much work was expected and you got feted with fancy meals and trips to interesting places.  But when we weren’t taken out to lunch, one of my favorite perks was the subsidized cafeteria at one of the firms. The food was decent and cheap, and it provided a great social break from the billable hour cycle.   But in the cafeteria there was a rather mysterious closed-off side room for the partners.  And so while we’d sometimes enter the cafeteria with the partners, they always veered off into that special room and disappeared to eat.  My friends and I would joke about what might be behind the door... imagining linen tablecloths and caviar by candlelight, and maybe some of those kneeling massage stations.  In the reg...

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...