Have you heard of what’s called the Serenity Prayer? It was penned (or at least the story goes) by Reinhold Niebuhr, a professor at Union Seminary in New York City in 1939 and made popular, of course, by Alcoholics Anonymous. In fact, one of AA’s founders, an Episcopal priest named Sam Shoemaker, helped introduce the…

Four men approach Jesus with a paralytic. It’s an incredibly familiar story, told in a couple of different settings in the gospels. But did you notice what comes out of Jesus’s mouth? As it’s translated here, “Take heart” (Matt. 9:2b), or (more accurately), “Stay courageous.” “Your sins are forgiven.” And he also says, “Your sins…

Several years ago, I had organized a Good Friday service that was a combination of music and meditations. And my music director brought in a young viola player for an obligato part in a choral piece. I went up before the service to introduce myself, and we chatted for a little bit. As might be…

In the eleventh chapter of Matthew, Jesus, as he often did, used an analogy to communicate truth. In this case, the analogy is one the nation of Israel had heard again and again, that of a yoke. The Yoke That Oppresses And of course you know what a yoke is. It’s a bar with a…

In this election season, isn’t it tempting to get caught up in the frenzy? Everyone we encounter seems to want to polarize and divide us. “Whose side are you on?” “If you vote for him/her you are voting to dismantle our democracy!” “If you don’t vote at all, you’re just giving a vote to him/her.”…

I want you to imagine with me a little of what life might have been like for those early believers who saw Jesus ascend into heaven and waited for him in the Upper Room. You can read the real story in the first and second chapters of Acts. But for just a few minutes, let’s…

Each spring, our churches have a Collect that honors Edward Thomas Demby and Henry Beard Delany, the first and second African-American bishops consecrated in The Episcopal Church. As the prayer says, they, “though limited by segregation, served faithfully to [God’s] honor and glory” (Lessons Appointed for Use on the Feast of Edward Thomas Demby and…

Genuine Christian commitment takes courage, more now than ever before. But how do we obtain it? What will make us brave? We live in a world that is more and more suspicious of genuine religious commitment. Many of the people we know would prefer not that we would have no religious faith, but that our…

A Profane Horror Have you ever considered the crucifixion of Jesus? When you pray and meditate on it, his physical death is nothing less than what Jürgen Moltmann called “a profane horror”—the mutilated body of Jesus strung up on a cross, so disfigured by the lacerations and the wounds of the lashings and beatings that…

What do you think about when you hear the word Lent? The world bombards us with questions: “What are you doing for Lent?” “What are you giving up for Lent this year?” “How long do you think you can go without Starbucks [or fast food, or sugar, or whatever they think might be a typical…