Category: Sermons

“Hope.” There’s that word again; it must be important. I’m thinking in fact that hope is at the very foundation of what it means to be in relationship with God. We can’t prove God exists, so we have faith in God — faith that includes doubt. Faith plus doubt equals hope. And when I think of hope, believe it or not, I actually often think of the Hebrew Bible. The story of salvation in Jewish Scripture is incredibly rich and vibrant with bright colorful imagery and poetry with drama and intensity. The stories themselves not only reflect God’s movement through vast oceanic expanses of feeling that undergird the behavior of individuals, tribes, and nations; these stories reach into our very core places.

Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life: Grant us so perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life, that we may steadfastly follow his steps in the way that leads to eternal life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Where do you encounter God? For faithful Jews of Jesus’ day, and surely Jesus himself was one of them, the ultimate locus of divine/human encounter would have been the Temple in Jerusalem. Beautiful and awe-inspiring, hallowed by prayers and history, focus of the sacrifices commanded in the Torah. It was an obligation and joy to worship there at significant moments of one’s personal life

This year as part of my Lenten practice I am reading a poem every day from the book The Heart’s Time, compiled by the wonderful English liturgist Janet Morley. She says this about poetry, whether written with conscious religious intention or not: “It is common for a poem to examine something familiar in such a way that it becomes newly strange. Applied to religious