Today is the last Sunday before Advent, and therefore the final Sunday of the Western Christian calendar, known as Christ the King, or Reign of Christ Sunday. It's fitting that the Church sets apart this day of endings and beginnings — the fulfillment and fruition of the whole year from Christmas, Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost … Continue reading The King’s Justice
There's a common scene in television and film that goes something like this: A group of soldiers is hanging out on a watchtower late at night, only half paying attention to their watch. Weeks, if not years, of seeing nothing has lulled them into complacency and so they relax and tell stories and bawdy jokes … Continue reading Children of the Light
I've got some good news for you this morning. This relentless, seemingly interminable year is in fact drawing to an end. The snowfall earlier this week and the golden carpet of leaves cushioning my morning runs leave no doubt about this. The flip side of the waning of the year is that Advent is just … Continue reading Back to Basics
On an early April evening in 1968, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in support of Black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. It had been a long and difficult stretch for him and for his fellow workers in the Civil Rights Movement. That evening, in the face of increasingly hostile opposition — his flight … Continue reading I Have Seen the Promised Land: A Reflection on Deuteronomy 34.1-12
Over the past few weeks, while we've been working through Paul's vision of Christian life and community in Romans 12-13, the Sunday lectionary has simultaneously been working through another story of the confrontation between God's people and Empire, that great paradigmatic story at the heart of both Judaism and Christianity: the Exodus. The part of … Continue reading The God of the Hebrews: A Reflection on Exodus 14.19-31
