“Bearing contempt for others cannot be made right just by offering a gift at the altar. No, that’s too easy, and avoids the very real work of reconciliation. The entire point of covenants and commandments is that we live in RELATIONSHIP with God and with each other.”
“As hard as this is, I know others around me suffer greater strains with joblessness, food insecurity, home-schooling children, worrying about aging parents, etc. I know I am not alone when I say, “how did I get here?”. And yet here I am in this exiled life.”
“A new month rises
with the chance to experience God anew
in stories and songs …”
“Cry aloud, in habitants of Zion, ring out your joy,
for the great one in the midst of you is the Holy One of Israel.”
“Projecting evil onto others and then hoping that what we have imagined about them is an unclean spirit that can be somehow cast out of them is a way of pulling back and away from our neighbors. They become not quite human to us when we do this.”
Mark 4:35-41 One of the great things I remember about growing up was our town. I knew almost everybody who lived there, its history and
“Only now can the writer begin the gilding, which the iconographer breathes as much as applies it, much like the breath of God breathed life into humankind.”
“And as I listened to Bible stories read to me by my mother, I began to notice when in the Bible it stated that a character was amazed, such as this Sunday, when we hear still in chapter one of Mark’s gospel how Jesus’s teaching and healing amazed those in the synagogue who witnessed them.”
“Worship, meaning to turn attention to concentration and consecration, to turn aside not only from tasks, but from myself. Worship, which explains why silence in communion is so … simultaneously emptying and filling.”
“You are mine, my beloved, my child
in my arms you are safe
you are held.
you are never alone. “