Where are you traveling, beloved sisters and brothers?  Do you have resources to meet your need of God and each other? He was traveler in those parts, traveling thru one village to get to another, though culture and common wisdom would have dictated that he completely circumvent the village of despised Samaritans, rather than passing… [Read More]

  In August of 1982, just after he turned 21 years old, Todd Weems was murdered.  His mother, Ann Weems poured out her grief in the following years—giving voice to the bitter and difficult cauldron of emotions that filled her. She wrote: O God, find me! I am lost In the valley of grief, and… [Read More]

   Today is the first Sunday in Lent and we’ve just entered the wilderness with Jesus. Now some of you might be sitting there saying to yourselves that you feel like you’ve been in the wilderness all year—Lent or no Lent. Maybe you have been caring for an elderly parent, maybe you have been struggling… [Read More]

At my last call, the church had a very rustic cross that we would place on the crest of Church Hill, the edge of High Street, just before our Easter sunrise worship service.  When we first began to do this, I felt that it was important to bring the cross to the place where we,… [Read More]

  “It’s not down in any map; true places never are.” So writes Herman Melville in the novel Moby Dick. When I was an exchange student in Sweden, I had a good friend named Sasha.   Sasha wore a lot of black leather; she had spikey, purple-colored hair, and green psychedelic nail polish.  She also had… [Read More]

Several years ago, I visited one of my Hospice patients at a local nursing facility when I was accosted by another resident.  I had just made it past the nursing station when a lady sitting close by fixed her attention squarely on me.  With a voice that commanded my attention, she rather impatiently and loudly… [Read More]

In the baptismal liturgy for the United Church of Christ, as set forth in our Book of Worship, there is a question we pastors often ask of parents who have brought their children to the church to be baptized: “Do you promise, by the grace of God, to be Christ’s disciple, to follow in the… [Read More]

Are you a dreamer?  Not the daytime fantasy sort, though those dreams have their place in motivating us to imagine something bigger and wider than our imaginations can often muster.  No, I mean those nocturnal dreams that come either in the middle of the night or those which occur sometime in the wee morning hours… [Read More]

The Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany seasons, joined as they are, all involve looking for a sign. What sign are you?  Years ago, as a child, I would play “pretend” like many children and dress myself in long flowing skirts, beads, and a bandana and position myself at the end of a path which led into… [Read More]

There was no king like David.  He was the epitome of a good ruler, despite his many failings.  He walked with the Lord.  “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”  When this line was written, the Davidic dynasty seemed to be waning.  War… [Read More]