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Proper 22 Year B 2024: Mark 10:2-16

When I was a hospital chaplain intern, I worked at Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, VA. 45 minutes - without traffic - South of Washington, DC, this Episcopalian was firmly in Baptist country. Therefore, every so often, I was asked what my favorite Bible verse was. I liked to answer John 3:17. Not 3:16, 3:17. Most people who ask you what your favorite Bible verse is know John 3:16: For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life. The problem is, that verse gets used in a pretty aggressive way to try and scare people away from perishing into eternal life by believing. One of my favorite quips is, “I can do all things through a single verse taken out of context.” Which brings me back to John 3:17: Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Maybe 3:16 is about more than being afraid of death. Maybe, with some more
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Proper 21 Year B 2024: Numbers 11:4-6,10-16,24-29

  My husband and I like to play video games together. When I say “we” play them, we’ve tried to play cooperative games, but what works best for us is that he plays a game and I backseat game - like backseat driving, but far less annoying, or so I hope. A couple of years ago “we” played a game called Immortality . In this game, you solve the mystery of a missing actress through “found footage” from three of her unreleased movies. Each movie has its own storyline, but in it are other storylines applicable to your investigation, so each clip from these unreleased movies are doubly interesting: for what they say in the context of the story the movie is telling and how they speak to you as the detective searching through the footage. Our lesson from Numbers today does the same thing: several stories about humanity hidden within the larger story. While the story told throughout the Pentateuch is one unified story of how Israel became established as God’s people, from Creation to arrival at t
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Feast of St. Matthew 2024: Matthew 9:9-13

Emmy winning comedy writer Michael Jamin has written for several well-known shows over the past 30 years, beginning with Just Shoot Me and continuing with King of the Hill and Rules of Engagement . When production slowed during Covid, he built a strong social media following with his videos on Tik Tok and Instagram. Sometimes he shares screenwriting tips, sometimes he opens residual checks, the payment writers receive when shows they’ve worked on rerun, where he’ll tell his audience “I don’t know why this works out to 41 cents, I’m just opening the check”, and sometimes he’ll share insider “tricks of the trade”. One of his videos that I found really interesting was on laugh tracks. People claim to hate laugh tracks. If you survey people on their opinions on laugh tracks, they will almost unanimously claim to have an unfavorable view of laugh tracks. However, there’s a reason they continue to be put in shows: because we are wrong. When sitcoms are audience tested with and without lau
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Proper 18 Year B 2024: Mark 7:24-37

  Dr. Amy-Jill Levine is a well respected New Testament scholar. She wrote an article in March of 2021 entitled Holy Week and the hatred of the Jews: How to avoid anti-Judaism this Easter . In the article, Dr. Levine notes that while in modernity, interfaith dialogue has made tremendous progress in the way in which the passion narratives are interpreted by mainline Christian denominations, we still have to deal with our past and acknowledge that every time the passion narratives resurface, the threat of anti-Judaism reemerges.  In her article, Dr. Levine is particularly focused on passion narratives, but there are troubling texts throughout the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible. Dr. Levine acknowledges that people of all faiths have troubling texts in their canons. She lists, in order from least to most  useful, six strategies for dealing with those troubling texts. She begins with excision, or cutting the text out and pretending it isn’t there - what Dr. Levine considers least useful
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Proper 17 Year B 2024: James 1:17-27

I was in a parish discussion group where the beginning prompt for the day was “what is a prayer practice that is meaningful to you?” Responses varied, ranging from more structured practices like praying the daily office and using Anglican prayer beads to more freeform practices like breath prayer and centering prayer. One of the great things about there being such a wide variety of prayer practices available to us is that we can adjust for what we want to talk about with God, where we are emotionally at any time, or even, simply, how we feel like praying at that moment. There are so many ways in which we have connected with God in the past and we can look to any one of them when we’re entering into a time of prayer. Every Sunday in our Eucharistic liturgy we spend most of our time in prayer together - we just mix up the ways in which we pray so that it tricks us out of feeling like we’re spending the better part of an hour in prayer together. Just this morning so far, we began with a h
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Proper 15 Year B 2024: Psalm 34

When I was a senior in high school, for my English class we each had to write a paper analyzing a poem. We were given a packet of choices full of enough options that our teacher wasn’t going to have to read 10 papers on the same poem. I made my choice in the quintessential high school senior way: which one I thought would mean I had to do the least amount of work; which poem seemed the most straightforward. The fact that I was choosing from a collection provided by the teacher was totally lost in my quest for a black and white, say what you mean text. Even though I thought I found one, writing that assignment taught me something important about language and about how we express ourselves. How even when we do say what we mean, there are implications in the choices of how we phrase anything. And how I learned at 17 that digging deep into something like poetry can reveal the true depths of our feelings and expose truths in a way prose is not equipped to do. When we think of poetry and scr
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Proper 14 Year B 2024: 1 Kings 19:4-8

A couple of times in my career, now, I’ve had the experience of being the go-to remaining staff person when a rector had left the parish and we were waiting for an interim. At the beginning of this year, my rector moved on to a new call and I remained as a solo priest in a parish that was definitely a two full-time priest parish. For a good portion of the time waiting for an interim, we weren’t sure who the interim would be yet and so I was limited in my ability to plan too far out, as I didn’t want to tie the hands of whoever would be coming in as interim rector. During this time, my colleague Mother Jean was in an accident where she was hospitalized. She posted to social media from her hospital bed that she was binge watching Forensic Files and I had a moment where I thought, “Man, that sounds nice, to just not do anything for a day.” Which really told me how burnt out I was getting. Because Jean was “getting” to watch Forensic Files all day because she was in the hospital. She had
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