Year B: Trinity Sunday - First Sunday After Pentecost
J.R.R. Tolkien, the brilliant mind behind The Lord of the Rings trilogy, was enchanted with words. It started early in his life. When he was just a boy growing up near Birmingham, England, he would watch the trains from Wales chug through the countryside. The cars on the trains bore Welsh words describing the contents. […]
Read MoreYear B: Day of Pentecost
The Witness of Scripture: The ancient instruction book of the church, Didache, says “Two ways there are, one of Life and one of Death, and there is a great difference between the two ways.” Didache; VI, 15) Most of us don’t think of church, especially worship, as being a “life or death” matter. However, […]
Read MoreYear B – Seventh Sunday of Easter
The Introduction: The Hispanic writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, wrote exquisite novels – One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera and others – that express the importance of remembering. Marquez shows us that sometimes people are trapped in the past, living out of nostalgia. But he also shows […]
Read MoreYear B - Sixth Sunday of Easter
The Witness of Scripture: This morning we come to one of the most important texts in all of the Bible. It marks the turning point in the early church and most certainly the book of Acts. Interestingly enough, we are not as familiar with this text as we are others. Perhaps it’s because this experience […]
Read MoreLectionary Year B – The Fourth Sunday of Advent
The Witness of Scripture: Angel visits are not all that they are cracked up to be. Far from being sweet meetings of assurance, those divine sojourners tend to disrupt our worlds in ways that can be frightening. After all, their first words are nearly always, “Fear not.” This morning we come to the most […]
Read MoreYear B – The Third Sunday of Advent
The Witness of Scripture: Do you remember how anxious the world was just before the beginning of the new millennium? People were really worked up, almost to the point of widespread hysteria. What was going to happen about computers? And if things went wrong with computers just think of the domino effect with planes in […]
Read MoreYear B - The Second Sunday of Advent
The Witness of Scripture: Mark’s gospel does not begin with angels whispering in Mary’s ear. There are no shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night, no wise men from the east following a star, no big-eyed animals standing around a straw-stuffed manger. Mark either did not know about those things or else he did […]
Read MoreYear B – The First Sunday of Advent
The Witness of Scripture: Today marks an interesting time in the church, the beginning of Advent, that time when our pulse quickens and anticipation heightens. Strangely enough, the church has become more and more interested in Christmas than Advent. Like Holy Week we love the pageantry of Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday but tend to […]
Read MoreYear C – Easter; Resurrection of the Lord
The Witness of Scripture: Griff: Happy Easter! What an easy thing to say; what an enormous thing to grasp. Mike: The great theologian, Karl Barth, once said that people come to church on Easter with one question on their mind. The question is: “Is it true?” (Is Easter true? Is it true about the resurrection?) […]
Read MoreYear C – Fifth Sunday in Lent
The Witness of Scripture: This morning as we journey through Lent, we travel with a sense of trepidation, don’t we? In the midst of all the celebration and anticipation, there is the deep bass beat of evil lurking. We follow Jesus with the guidance of John, the self-professed “Beloved Disciple.” John has had this way […]
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