In the reading from Genesis, the soap opera of the descendants of Abraham continues. Joseph, condemned to slavery in Egypt by his envious brothers, becomes Pharaoh’s chief of staff. When famine strikes the land, his brothers are forced to ask for help from Pharaoh, making an awful choice between slavery and starvation. And are they…
We’ve been reading the saga of Abraham and his descendants all summer long, but I’ve only addressed it from the pulpit once, when we heard the story of the binding of Isaac. With Joseph’s story we’re now at the fourth generation of this most famous of dysfunctional families. Because some of you haven’t been here…
To be honest, I had intended to talk about Jacob this Sunday. We’ve been reading the story of Jacob for a few weeks now, and it seemed like about time that we reflected on what we’ve been reading, but when we received the urgent request from Mount Airy Net to replenish the shelves of the…
Today we celebrate our church’s name day – the feast of Saint James the Elder. It might be useful to start with some of what Wikipedia calls disambiguation, because there are a lot of James’s who are significant to the church. There is, of course, King James the First of England, who gives us the…
Last week, we began reading a portion of Matthew’s Gospel that tells of Jesus teaching the increasingly large crowds that appear wherever he goes using parables. Today, and for the next few weeks, we will continue to hear what Jesus has to say to his followers, both the stories he tells publicly, and the interpretations of the stories he offers to his…
“Listen! A sower went out to sow.” This is the first of a string of parables that comprise the thirteenth chapter of Matthew’s gospel. Matthew begins this thirteenth chapter by telling us that the things he is talking about happened on the same day as those that end the previous chapter, which is the storyteller’s way of saying that the two narratives…
Most of you, I’m sure, are familiar with the musical setting of the end of today’s Gospel lesson that concludes the first part of Handel’s Messiah. Charles Jennens, Handel’s librettist, changed the scripture text from first person to third to fit the context of the oratorio, but whether it’s Jesus saying “My yoke is easy,” or a chorus singing “His yoke is…
As I hope you’ve come to know by now, I take scripture very seriously. All of it. The parts that make sense to me and the parts that don’t. The parts that give me joy and the parts that make me angry. The parts I like and the parts I don’t like. And there are lots of parts in scripture that are…
“So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known?” Don’t you just love it when Jesus gets all apocalyptic like this, when he starts throwing tables around, or calling people hypocrites and vipers, or talking about fire and strife and division as if it were a good…
It’s the feast of the Holy Trinity, a feast dedicated to God in all of God’s mysterious, complicated self. It is the custom of the Church to put the seminarian in the pulpit on Trinity Sunday, or the clergy person with the least seniority, not because they have taken theology classes most recently and are therefore able to expound best on this…