So it’s here—the500th anniversary of the so-called ‘start’ of the Reformation. 500 years ago (on Tuesday) Martin Luther pounded his 95 Theses into the door at the church in Wittenberg—that same church I visited this spring on my trip to Germany—launching a series of events that ultimately led to the church in Germany (and eventually…
In the late spring of my sixth grade year, on a June morning much like this one, half of our class was taken up to the middle school for a tour of the space where we would be students the following year. The rest of us, for one reason or another, were already familiar with…
The story of Pentecost is one of my most favorite. I suppose part of it is that it has to do with languages—my first love, academically, was languages. I am fascinated with words and whenever I am in a position of wrestling with the meaning of things, I will always return to the words used,…
“Why are you standing there, looking up toward heaven?” The book of Acts is a continuation of the Gospel of Luke, and it is written by an author who likes to ask TOUGH questions. We didn’t hear the Easter reading from the Gospel of Luke this year, but in it, the women at the…
The fourth Sunday of Easter is always Good Shepherd Sunday. We have a reading in which Jesus is portrayed as a faithful shepherd, we read the 23rd psalm. It is the Sunday when the Gospel reading finally moves past the stories of that day of Resurrection, and it is a kind of turning point in…
Several years ago a priest friend of my family called one Easter afternoon and asked with some urgency, “Have you heard the news?!” It was one of those years when there seemed to be bad news every time you turned around, so all the joy I had felt after our Easter morning church service drained…
The theme in today’s readings is Resurrection, even if it seems a bit too early for that. Easter isn’t for another two weeks; isn’t the lectionary rushing things along a little? Jesus hasn’t even died yet how can we be talking resurrection already? A partial answer is the resurrection in the readings today is the…
All Saints Sunday—at least the way I observe it—is a combination of both All Saints and All Souls. A day to remember the “great cloud of witnesses” who surround us. People whose lives were so extraordinary that we remember their names even now, hundreds, even thousands of years later. Saints like Augustine of Hippo and…
Today is Reformation Sunday, the day when we celebrate that 499 years ago, Martin Luther pounded his 95 Theses into the door at the church in Wittenberg, launching a series of events that ultimately led to the church in Germany (and eventually several other countries, including England) breaking with the church in Rome. Except he…
