Today’s reading from Mark reads like palace intrigue and conspiracy against John the Baptist. We first hear about John when Jesus goes to be baptized; he is clothed in animal…
Saint Paul was a man of tremendous ambition. We have a museum-quality idea of saints that preserves them for history in a sort of cotton wool halo of meek-and-mild perfection.…
The first of a summer preaching series on the distinctive marks of Christian communities. We have been doing this for so long, this gathering together of our two parishes for…
This was going to be a sermon about forgiveness, and specifically about a teaching of Jesus about how forgiveness works and what its limits might be. As I read through…
Not long ago I came across a post on Facebook—that endless source of provocation—from someone I think must be about my age, and who is a member of an Episcopal…
I’ve recently been reading a powerful little book by Professor Tim Snyder, a historian at Yale, called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Snyder studies the rise of…
Imagine with me, for just a moment, a story. Imagine that there is a college counselor somewhere in America, in a place out in the midwest somewhere. Imagine that she…
Sometimes the lectionary offers a group of lessons for Sunday morning that seem to speak directly to the issues of our day. Sometimes they don’t, and when that happens, as…
Where I grew up, this season of very cold weather always brought with it a certainty about at least one thing you would be doing at school. During the more…