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Lent 3 Year C 2025: Luke 13:1-9

We watch a lot of Sesame Street in my house. I have a two-year-old who is all about putting her coat on “the Elmo way” and a five-year-old who is personally offended by litterbugs. Sesame Street’s method of teaching the three R’s - reduce, reuse, recycle - calls upon the help of Redusa the Recycling Fairy, who helps everyone on Sesame Street transform their trash into something new to help keep the earth green and beautiful - much to the chagrin of Oscar the Grouch, who sees his beloved trash vanishing. Redusa repairs her relationship with Oscar by turning a broken ice cream maker into a mud maker so Oscar can make mud pies. We have our own three R’s in the Church - remorse, repentance, and reconciliation. Jesus calls us to repentance in a bit of a roundabout way. Jesus recalls two instances of suffering: the Galileans whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices and the people killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them. Jesus’ reflection on both of these events flies in the face o...
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Lent 2 Year C 2025: Philippians 3:17-4:1

The Tuesday afternoon Lenten book group is reading Entering the Passion of Jesus . In the book’s introduction the author, Amy-Jill Levine, a New Testament professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School, was explaining her perspective on the text, as she is a practicing Jew. She told a story about when her children were little and they would have divinity students babysit. At times, the children’s favorite babysitters were unavailable because of field education placements. They may have been on a mission trip, or they were working at Nashville’s “Room In The Inn” homelessness program. The children would say “they can’t come because they are being Christian.” Their parents thought that was a “splendid” definition of the term “Christian”.  Paul wants the Philippian Christians to be like those divinity students: shining as lights amid a crooked and wayward generation and holding fast to the word of life, so that he will know that he has not run the race in vain. Paul reminds us that we are ca...
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Lent 1 Year C 2025: Luke 4:1-13

In November of 1856, the chief cashier of Dublin’s Broadstone railway terminal was murdered. Through a bungled police investigation, including an open crime scene where the public came by to check it out and to take souvenirs - far more common of a practice than you would think - the culprit was never brought to justice. But there was one person who was convinced that he could prove the identity of the killer, using a revolutionary new scientific method that would leave no room for doubt. His name was Frederick Bridges, and he was a phrenologist. Phrenology was a discipline which became enormously popular for a period in the nineteenth century. Phrenologists believed that the shape of a person's brain gave an indication of their personality and talents. They claimed that simply by examining a client's head, by feeling the pattern of bumps and ridges unique to each skull, they could provide a detailed account of an individual's mental abilities and character. Bridges wanted ...
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Last Epiphany Year C 2025: Exodus 34:29-35

When I was in college, I took a class called Human Rights in Theory and Practice . In that class, we had a discussion about where our rights come from. And the consensus in the class was essentially that they come from being human; they are intrinsic. I would add that they come from God. After class on the day of that discussion, I was talking about it with my stepdad, who taught civics. I posed the question to him and his response was “from the government”. When I pushed back with the answer my class had discerned, his reaction was, “well that’s nice, but who is enforcing it?” And I see his point. But I still think my class of potentially overly-idealistic undergrads was right. Just because a community is unable to act on the rights which are given by God does not mean that they don’t deserve those rights. There have been plenty of times throughout history when people’s knowledge that they should have the rights that their government is withholding from them call those whose rights ar...
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7 Epiphany Year C 2025: Luke 6:27-38

When I was working at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Arlington, VA, we held a children's chapel during the liturgy of the word every Sunday. One Sunday, we were talking with the kids about the call to love our enemies. The kids were struggling with the lesson because none of these K-3rd graders had enemies. Plus, their only exposure to an enemy was probably in a superhero cartoon, so of course none of them had an enemy like the Green Goblin. And so the kids had a really hard time understanding what it was to love an enemy because they couldn’t understand having an enemy. While adults understand that enemies occur in real life and usually don’t have masks and superpowers, we oftentimes have the same problems with this text as the kids in children’s chapel had. We wouldn’t identify people as enemies. Sure there are people that I don’t particularly like. There might even be people that I think are actively against me, but I don’t feel comfortable calling them enemies. It just feels li...
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6 Epiphany Year C 2025: Luke 6:17-26

When you begin seminary, there is a whole host of new vocabulary to learn. My friend Fr. Stephen calls them “Ten Dollar Seminary Words”. For example, if you want to get lunch, the place to go is not the “cafeteria” but instead the “refectory”. If you are writing a paper on some scripture, it isn’t a “section”, but rather a “pericope” - a word that you have to be careful with, because Microsoft Word will auto-correct it to “periscope”. And if you are in a Bible class and looking to talk about someone’s method of biblical interpretation, the Ten Dollar Seminary Word there is “hermeneutic” - a word I had to look up every time I encountered it for a while. It just wouldn’t stick, because I could not understand why we needed another word when “biblical interpretation method” was working just fine for me. There are four main schools of hermeneutics: literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical. What is important to know is that any time you read scripture, you are approaching it with a hermen...
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5 Epiphany, Year C 2025: Luke 5:1-11

Elizabeth Ann Seton was born in New York City on August 28, 1774, and was raised as an Episcopalian. In 1795 she married William Seton, and their family came to include five children. In 1801, the family business went bankrupt. In 1803, her husband developed symptoms of tuberculosis, and they set sail for Italy in the hopes that the warm climate might cure his disease. The Italian authorities, fearing yellow fever, quarantined them in a cold stone hospital for the dying, resulting in William’s death. Elizabeth, now a young widow struggling to support five children with few resources, was befriended by Roman Catholics and, as a result, was drawn to the Catholic Church. Returning to New York with five children to support, she found herself alone and in financial straits. She turned to Catholic clergy for support and, in 1805, she formally became a member of the Catholic Church. In 1806, she met Father Louis Dubourg, who wanted to start a congregation of women religious, patterned after t...
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