Sunday Morning & Beyond
The Holy Spirit Resides in My Mattress
The Holy Spirit resides in my mattress … I’m pretty sure. The first time I noticed this was when I was in college, though I didn’t call it the Holy Spirit then. I would go to bed after struggling with a paper or project and would wake up with the perfect thing to fit in the project or the perfect connection in the paper. It wasn’t just an idea … it was like the whole paper was written in my head while I slept.
Confirmation Cliff-Jumping
Again this year, I am writing a liturgy for confirmation with confusion, questioning, and consternation. I love the kids who are being confirmed. I love the community and camaraderie they have developed in a year of meeting, retreating, questioning, wondering, discovering, and constructing. I love how they articulate their faith…not always complete, not always theologically “correct”, but genuinely, from a deep place in their hearts, a place where God lives and the Spirit moves.
And yet when I gather with other young clergy, the confirmation issue always seems to come up. It’s always been “done,” say our congregations, our head pastors, and our older colleagues. Most of us seem to feel like the way it’s done doesn’t really fit anymore. We don’t know what to do with it.
The Other Woman: A Conversation Between Hagar and Sarah
This dramatic reading is a re-imagining of two of Abraham’s wives—Sarah and Hagar. It attempts to both respect and conflate the various interpretations of each woman in Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions, and among the African-American community. The women are trying to explain their historical lives, understand their present identities, and the connections between the two. The beginning and end should have a serious tone, while the middle sections are more conversational, as if they are figuring things out along with us.
It was originally performed by Elsa Peters and Stacy Smith at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in May 2006.
Good Friday: A Service of Shadows and Stones
Our congregation has used Taizé, Tenebrae, and narratives of the Passion in past Good Friday services. I grew up in a congregation that often used the 7 last words of Christ as a focal point. I wrote this liturgy to combine some of these elements, but also wanting to add some concrete way for people to respond. I came up with the idea of using stones: stones as worry stones; stones as weights; stones as symbols of altars built where people have an encounter with God; and stones as used in modern Judaism to leave at a grave site as a way to honor the memory of the deceased.
Holy Housework
The work of Lent is something of a spiritual house-cleaning: whether it involves organizing a back closet, bringing out and discarding things that need to go, adding something beautiful to a room, making space for a new guest. Hard work, but it sounds so beautiful when it's something done in your heart and soul.
But in the midst of all that spiritual work, the everyday work of dusting, scrubbing and organizing real rooms doesn't go away. This month, we bring you a sermon that reminds how this, too, is a spiritual pursuit.
Do You Want to Be Made Well?
“Do you want to be made well?”
What an Ash Wednesday question.
On a day where we traditionally hear about our own sinfulness
and are faced with our own mortality,
“to dust you shall return,”
what a question to consider.
Of course we want to be made well. Of course we do. Duh.
Advent Prayer
Lord God, God of beginnings, and endings,
God of the past, God of the future,
God of judgment, and God of grace,
God of waiting, and God of fulfillment:
Fulfill in us the coming of Christ.
May we, O God,
Like Mary, treasure and guard the coming of your kingdom deep within us
Nourishing it as it grows,
Delighting in its first flutterings,
cradling its growing weight in our hands,
until it is ready to come and call out to the world. Amen.
Six Degrees: A Homily and Prayer Litany for World AIDS Day
Six degrees of separation. Some of you may be familiar with this phrase from a movie with that title. Some of you may have played the “Six degrees of separation” game. The game challenges you to figure out if you are 6 degrees or less away from Kevin Bacon! This means you and Kevin are linked through friends . . . and friends of friends. So if you and Kevin were to compare lists of friends and acquaintances, before long you’d be connected: just a few people between you and Mr. Bacon himself. Kinda spooky.
We live in a world in which we are just six handshakes away from anyone else. Chances are that you don’t personally know any Australian police officers, the Chancellor of Germany, or a member of the English Parliament. But! Maybe you know someone whose cousin studied abroad in Australia and had a run-in with the police. Or maybe you know a German professor here who knows someone who’s related to someone whose friend works for the German government. You get the idea. Basically, many believe that every person on the planet is separated from everyone else by a chain of about six people.
Miles to Go
Though it is in our lectionary, our Lamentations text - this prayer of pain and petition - is not something we hear every day. I doubt many of us could quote from Lamentations as easily as we could from Psalms, from Isaiah, or from any of the gospels or epistles. So when we do hear from this book, it may come as a shock to our system. When I’ve told people that one of the texts I would be preaching from this morning is Lamentations, I got very similar responses. There were a few “ohs” and “that’s interesting,” and even an occasional “oh my.” Not exactly the words of assurance a woman would want. But these words did not really surprise me for what we find in this book – undiluted expressions of despair – are rarely the passages we seek out for nice Bible studies or our bedtime readings.
Friend, Move Up Higher
I can’t remember which member of the search committee said it. But I definitely remember their words: “Now that you are moving to Portland, no more Starbucks.” And it’s true. There are so many locally owned coffee shops in Portland… But I have to confess. I still love Starbucks. Starbucks was my first job. They were the first ones to offer me health insurance. And their coffee is just so good. I can’t help it. I love Starbucks.
Of course, there are problems with this love. There are things that I really don’t like about them. I don’t like that Starbucks destroys local businesses. I don’t like that each and every store looks exactly the same. I don’t like that they don’t even attempt to provide a living wage to the coffee pickers.
