Anyone who is in recovery from addiction, or knows someone in recovery, knows that the journey back from death’s door begins when you hit rock bottom – when you have lost more of the things that matter to you than you can possibly bear to lose, and you feel utterly helpless in the powerful grip of your addiction. Good Friday is that…
We begin Holy week in a dramatic, complicated way. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, if our liturgy seems a bit disjointed, with the excitement of the Palm Procession leading abruptly into the drama and despair of the Passion gospel, there’s a reason for that. The two don’t really belong together. What we have is the mash-up of two ancient…
The raising of Lazarus from the dead in John’s gospel is not the only story we have of Jesus raising someone from the dead. But it is the one richest in detail and in symbolism. There are, as you probably noticed when you heard it, many things about the story that are confusing, and a few things that are troubling. Just like…
Where to start? There are so many layers in John’s account of Jesus and the man born blind. All four gospels contain stories of Jesus healing the blind, but in the Synoptics, these are merely tales of healing miracles. Only John’s gospel puts in so much detail; piles so much meaning and symbolism onto this particular act of healing. No doubt this…
Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! Is this not the Christ? Here’s a story to make you stop and wonder. A man speaks in riddles to a woman he shouldn’t be talking to in the first place. She tells him a lie which turns out to be true, and he tells her the story of…
My first day in the office here at St. James’, I began poking around and reorganizing things, and one of the things I noticed was this Bible, which was sitting on the shelf in the entryway with a lot of miscellaneous stuff, some valuable, some less so. I took the Bible into my office to look at it and see whether it…
You have, no doubt, noticed that the church looks a little different. Your penance for having built such a wonderful, flexible space for worship is that worship leaders are going to want to take advantage of that flexibility. And this arrangement, which is similar to the way some Christian Churches would have been set up when the church moved out of worshiping…