We’ve heard about the month of March. It comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb – or vice versa. Accordingly, we are currently in for a lovely April 1st, or may instead end up April fooled. March is a month in which we expect to be either surprised or sideswiped! This…
Beloved community. There is a paraphrase of a Mary Oliver maxim that captures something of communal worship: Show up. Be amazed. Tell about it. There are many ways we worship! Each of us may do so anywhere, anytime, alone or in bundles, and indeed we do. We worship separately in songs and prayers and actions…
Beloved Community, A new year has begun, and I am ready to celebrate its unfolding! 2020 was a year of challenges on a global level – a year of resourcefulness and vigilance and constant check-ins for our community. And as strange, fluid, precarious and unexpected as it was, David and I personally crowned the year…
Dear Fellow Travelers, We are in the season of anticipation! The word alone can make a person jiggly. “Come on, come on, come on,” we wiggle, “Enough with the waiting. Let’s go!” There are many times we wait. We wait in line at the Post Office, for the results of tests; for supper. We wait…
Holy Moley, Friends!!We are in motion!!Make no mistake about it, we are going into winter with NO plans of hibernation. In fact, I feel the need to remind us all that as we do our fall work of putting things in order for the long, cold season, we also will remember the basic safety guidelines…
Friends, It is October! Why am I so giddy? I have learned to greet the month with glee. I was born on the 2nd day and therefore long ago decided that I may claim the entire month as a celebration of being alive on this planet. I am convinced that the color in the leaves…
Beloved Friends, Thirty minutes into the clergy-only session of MN Annual Conference 2020, I found myself in my sun-porch home office with my computer, my note pad, and a take-out coffee, attempting to digest what had just happened. Two hundred (or so) MN UMC clergy had all completed 4 hours of preparation for this event,…
I begin to write this note listening to a recording of “Amazing Grace,” played on the sanctuary piano by Kathy Webb. I look up and out our front door and the snow-white squirrel that lives in our neighborhood pops up like a Jack-in-the-box in the lawn across the street.
I have long been fascinated by what Jesus looked like at the time he walked the dusty paths of Nazareth. I noticed early and often that the images of Jesus I encountered in the painting in the Sunday School classroom, in the stained-glass window in the sanctuary (pictured), and the small one in a book in my grandmother’s house looked nothing at all like one another.
It is difficult for me to speak these days. It is difficult to stand in a pulpit that has historically belonged primarily to white voices and raise up my own white experiences and sensibility, my own comparatively insignificant pain and suffering. And “difficult” doesn’t cut it. “Difficult” can’t stop us. I am so deeply humbled…
