Now. Here. This.

As we prepare ourselves for Thanksgiving and time many of us will spend around a table with loved ones, and when all of us will call upon or be visited by memories of tables and loved ones and Thanksgiving's past, I offer this poem from Joy Harjo on the miracle and...

Over the past two Wednesdays in Bible Study we have looked at a survey of scriptures to see what the Bible has to say about death, dying, and grief. This was on the occasion of All Saints Day, which we celebrated this past Sunday. But we also know that grief does not...

We track time differently in the church. To start, we use a different calendar than the world around us. Our church year begins with the First Sunday of Advent when the world around us restarts every January 1.  We keep a different set of holidays, or holy-days....

Amid budget talks and the news of JD’s upcoming departure, it’s possible that we have not made as big a deal of another important piece of business addressed in our quarterly church conference at the end of August: the creation of a new ad hoc committee to produce a...

“Some things you know all your life,” writes the poet, Philip Levine, in his poem, “The Simple Truth.”  “They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme, they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker, the glass of water, the...

In his wonderfully hopeful and challenging book, A Future That’s Bigger Than Our Past, author Sam Wells, the vicar of St. Martin in the Fields Church in London, begins by stating what we all know to be true, which is that the Church is changing. The Church is changing...

It’s “back to school” season, the time when all of us parents send our children out the door with fresh haircuts and new shoes and say to ourselves and anyone who will listen things like “time is moving so fast!” It turns out this is true in more than just a...

Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”   ​When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the...

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech to the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society in New York on the occasion of Independence Day. While Douglass himself was free, having escaped from slavery years before, slavery was still very much the law of the...

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to do one of the coolest and hardest things I’ll likely ever do. I joined three other gentlemen from our church—Shaun Kell, Doug Thompson, and Troy Tarpley—in a rim-to-rim run/hike of the Grand Canyon. It’s hard to put into words...

This past Thursday, members of our pastoral staff had an opportunity to join 25-30 community leaders for a meeting with Senator John Ossoff at the Tubman Museum for African American Art, History, and Culture. We gathered in the rotunda of the museum (an impressive...

I was a sophomore in high school when two teenage boys killed 13 students at Columbine High School. I still remember the collective shock that something like that could have happened. It seemed to expose something ugly and deeply disturbing about us as a people, and...

Two of the fingers on his right hand had been broken    so when he poured back into that hand it surprised him—it hurt him at first.   And the whole body was too small. Imagine the sky trying to fit into a tunnel carved into a hill.   He came into it...

In his beautiful book, “Telling the Truth,” Frederick Buechner writes that the gospel is “tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale,” all wrapped into one. “The gospel is bad news before it is good news,” he writes. Tragedy is that “we are sinners,” and that when we look in the...

It was almost exactly two years ago this past Sunday that our world shut down. At the church, we felt prepared. Weeks before, when we heard about this strange virus that may visit us, we had assembled a task force of church leaders, scientists, and public health...

Eastern Christianity speaks of the season of Lent as a time of “bright sadness.” It’s bright because we know the promise of resurrection waits for us on the other side. But there is nonetheless sadness because in order to see the light of Easter morning we must first...

In his introduction to the third edition of “Prayers for Private Devotions in War-Time,” a collection of prayers produced by The Memorial Church at Harvard University, Rev. Peter J. Gomes writes,  “Prayer is most needed when we are most divided, and we need the...