Alleluia!  Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!   There is a practice in the Orthodox tradition to tells jokes at Easter in honor of the joke that Jesus played on death in the resurrection. Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It happened in Sunday School.  It’s always Sunday School, isn’t it?  You see, Ms. Clara…

  Alleluia!  Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!   Fire and water, bread and wine:  these are the primal elements of our faith, the means by which we encounter God. Tonight as we’ve gathered they have been wrapped in darkness, and now light – and above all love. Lent is the journey through the wilderness of the sin of…

  Today everything is stripped bare.  We gather on this Good Friday to contemplate the death of Jesus. As much as we may want to, we can’t make the story either stop before Jesus dies, or fast forward to the empty tomb.  Today we must linger with the broken body of Jesus. The inevitability of the Good Friday story holds so much…

  One of my favorite children’s books is The Easter Story by Brian Wildsmith. I love it for two reasons.  First, it has the most amazing illustrations – the kind that set your heart to singing; and secondly, because it is a wonderful telling of the Easter story for children that in no way dumbs down the events from Palm Sunday all…

  Gracious God, take our minds and think through them; take our hands and work through them; take our hearts and set them on fire. Amen.     Parables don’t tell us what to do or how to behave, they tell us something of the nature of God. It’s important to remember this as we read again one of the most well-known…