Can you ever really go home again? In this passage from Mark’s gospel, we are told about Jesus’ return to Nazareth, his hometown, and his teaching among the people with and around whom he had been raised. The big question: how would he be received? As it happens, not so well.
Why no! I never thought other than / That God is that great absence / In our lives, the empty silence / Within, the place where we go / Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices / In our knowledge, the darkness / Between stars. His are the echoes / We follow, the footprints he has just / Left. We put our hands in…
His side hoping to find
A common challenge within marriages and committed relationships arises when one is a “believer,” a church-goer, and the other wants to hold back. It was very frequent in Paul’s communities when becoming a believer meant a radical new way of life outside accepted social norms, and it may be equally radical today in our post-Christian, secular era. How does such a relationship remain grounded without coercion of one another?
In today’s scripture, Jesus and his disciples got in a boat to head to the other side of the lake after a day of telling parables. A terrible windstorm approached, causing waves to break into the boat, filling it with water. Terrified, the disciples awakened Jesus, saying “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” Last summer my brother and his wife lost everything they owned in a devastating tornado that hit Oklahoma City. I imagine as the storm winds howled and they fled for safety…
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy. O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console…
The parable of the sower is one Sunday school story I vividly remember. I grew up in a place where rural landscapes were readily accessible, and my youthful imagination could easily visualize the margins of a field where rows of crops give way to patches of weeds and brambles, strips of roadside gravel and finally, asphalt. This parable still conjures specific visual memories for me.
“Out of the depths…” We have all been there. From the depths of our being we cry out in the depth of suffering – whether caused by health, finances, human relations, intellectual, psychological or spiritual crisis, or some vague and indefinable angst, we cry out. And often we feel that God does not hear us, or, if He does, He does not choose to answer. And, to make things worse…
In Genesis, Joseph has adjusted to life in Egypt and entered the service of the Pharaoh. After interpreting Pharaoh’s dream, he stores up enough food for seven years that when the seven years of famine arrive there is enough grain in Egypt to feed the world. When the Egyptians cry to Pharaoh for bread he instructs them to go to Joseph and…
In a society like ours that values personal liberty and choice — including harmful choices, for that matter — Paul’s question in today’s epistle carries some fairly loaded implications: “Don’t you know that you are …
Once again we have a gospel narrative in which Jesus performs a miracle of healing. Or is it healings? Jesus forgives the paralytic’s sins which is a spiritual healing. To prove to the doubting scribes, he commands…