Our passage from Romans today is one of my absolute favorites. I have preached on it a number of times, usually at funerals, most memorably, my father’s. It seemed especially fitting for his service since I had heard him preach on it so often. He was a Baptist pastor and I still have a vivid picture in my mind’s eye of him standing in the pulpit, holding his Bible in his right hand, and giving witness to his faith in a very impassioned way. He never met a passage from one of Paul’s letters that he didn’t love.
Read MoreMany of you probably know by now that I am hopelessly in love. Sure, with my wonderful fiancée Winnie, she is lovely and perfectly winsome and if I’m honest, probably not quite as lucky to be marrying me as I am to be marrying her. But that’s not what I am talking about. In addition to her, there’s something else that is wholly enrapturing to me and always has been. Something magnificent and arresting, something beautiful and fearsome, something strange and serene that compels me to drive three to five hours away nearly every weekend this time of year, just to catch a glimpse of it. I am in love with the ocean. Far more than leisure or the chance to work on my tan, being in that place where the land meets the sea is the closest I have found to the boundary between heaven and earth.
Read MoreThis past May, my husband Robbie and I were blessed to take a two week trip to Paris, and in the middle of our time there, we took a train to Amsterdam and stayed there for 3 days. The main reason that I wanted to go to Amsterdam was to visit the Van Gogh Museum. It was something of a pilgrimage for me, not in the same way as making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to walk the steps that Jesus walked, of course, but it was a sacred experience, because through many of Van Gogh’s works, I experience God at work in me.
Read MoreAbraham said, You shall not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, in whose land I live; but you shall go to my father’s house, to my kindred, and get a wife for my son.’ Genesis 24 : 38
God said to Abraham: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”
Let’s just pause for a moment to take in the gravity of these words we have heard. The words we have just proclaimed “Thanks be to God” after hearing. God – the God of love; the God who granted Abraham and Sarah a miraculous son, Isaac, in their old age; the God who promised to make a great nation of Abraham, whose children will be “as numerous as the stars in heaven,” has now commanded Abraham to commit filicide, to kill his promised son.
Read MoreThis past week I had the real joy of spending time with four remarkable young men from our parish, JS Wilson, Nicholas Lowe, Sam Arny, and Nick West – and two multitalented chaperone-extraordinaires, Parks Gilbert and Matt West, on a service trip to Appalachia in a tiny mountain town that was incidentally called Appalachia located the westernmost part of Virginia, but not West Virginia. We were in the mountains. Each day we rose early in the morning and shared a brief devotion with our fellow service trippers before setting off for a shady holler where we spent the day rebuilding a rotted out floor for an incredibly hospitable older couple who had lived nearly their entire lives beneath the coal mine above us where the husband had once worked.
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