Acts 2:42-47
Women’s work: for mother and daughter,
work goes on hour by hour.
They grind the grain into flour,
make a paste by adding water,
and place the dough onto a stone
in the smoky oven. They work to the bone
in the sweltering heat while the men
gathered in the temple are cool and clean.
Fourth Sunday of Easter
April 30, 2023
Acts 2:14a, 36-41
Don’t look back in sorrow
at the wrongs you did to others
or the wrong beliefs you held.
Sorrow is not the ask
of Jesus or John the Baptist.
Nothing you say or do
will change what you said or did,
don’t you see? Peter paused
to let that sink in.
Instead, he said, reorient yourself
to a new way of life, starting today,
with baptism in the name of Jesus
and acceptance of the Holy Spirit.
Some in the crowd turned away
from Peter’s altar call,
but three thousand came forward
and took on their new identities
as the People of the Way.
Third Sunday of Easter
April 23, 2023
Low Sunday is the Sunday after Easter
when we cheered the Lord’s ascendance.
The low is not for “low church.”
It’s about the small attendance.
Second Sunday of Easter
April 16, 2023
Happy Easter, everyone!
Jeremiah 31:1-6
The loveliest things are incredibly brief.
The loveliest things happen only once.
Years compress to minutes.
Nature does not care about your feelings.
Eight months after the 50-year reunion
of Y campers at Spirit Lake,
Mount St. Helens blew apart
and ruined the pristine lake forever.
It buried the YMCA camp
under hundreds of feet of timber and tephra.
Because of debris, the bottom of the new lake
is higher than the surface of the old lake.
The breathtaking symmetry of the iconic mountain,
proudly emblazoned on thousands of postcards,
is reduced to a pile of charcoal gray.
The Camp Loowit alumni
don’t meet in person any more.
They gather on Facebook.
Most discuss the loveliest hours of youth.
But there are some who celebrate
via the sideways scrolling of photographs
the green transformation of the blast site
and the return of animal life,
and though the site is different,
much different, from what it was before,
a new kind of beauty awaits those
who embrace the words of the prophet,
Again I will build you,
and you shall be built,
O virgin Israel!
Easter Sunday
April 9, 2023
Philippians 2:5-11
To the human eye,
the cornfield empties itself of value
for the rest of the year.
Ragged rows of stubble
stretch to the fog-bleared tree line.
Large puddles of freezing rainwater
and patches of old snow
punctuate the dun-horse devastation.
The autumn crop is obedient
to the point of death.
Tranquility is shattered
by a rising crescendo of trumpeter swans
haggling over their landing spots.
Gleaners from the far north fill their bellies
with the final treasures of the field,
then rise in unison to the heavens,
each as heavy as a small suitcase at Sea-Tac,
necks fully extended,
bleating furiously,
as they bolt for the breeding grounds.
Palm Sunday
April 2, 2023
Ezekiel 37:1-14
vanishing leaves…
skeletal woods are rising
from the dead
to clothe the black
with flesh again
Fifth Sunday in Lent
March 26, 2023
Ephesians 5:8-14
1.
Our will to work for good comes from God.
Live without complaint, without debate.
Be honest; be pure; be perfect children of God.
Live without blemish amid the crowd.
You will shine upon the world like bright stars.
You will shine because you bring the word of life.
2.
There is no need to worry. Live without care.
Don’t be anxious. Take no thought for life.
If you have a need, turn to God in prayer.
Turn to God in prayer and give him thanks.
May the peace of God that passes understanding
guard your hearts and thoughts in Jesus Christ.
Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 19, 2023
John 4:5-42
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
~ Reinhold Niebuhr ~
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference..
Who makes the rules for things we cannot change?
We’ll decide which rules to ignore or keep.
We won’t accept the things we cannot change.
It’s time to change the things we cannot accept.
God, grant to us the wisdom to know the course
you set for us—and not the course by others.
God, grant to us the courage to be the force
to overturn the rules prescribed by brothers.
We won’t accept the things we cannot change.
It’s time to change the things we cannot accept.
NOTE: These are lyrics for an anthem.
Third Sunday in Lent
March 12, 2023
The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it,
John 3:8
but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.
Wind over the lake—desiccate leaves
scrape indolently at our feet, like the years.
We feel the chill of the restless wind.
Fall’s maelstrom of reds and golds
is all around. The cool, invisible hand
lifts silvering hair.
We are entering autumn of our time together.
Some leaves have fallen, but many remain,
waiting to be plucked by wind over the lake.
NOTE: On this date, March 5, 2023, Nancy and I celebrate
our 57th anniversary. We were married at the Church
of the Redeemer, Kenmore. Fr. Roy Coulter officiated.
Second Sunday in Lent
March 5, 2023
Romans 5:12-19
Death does not hinge on human sin.
Literally.
Paul knows this.
Death and extinction long preceded
the arrival of humans and their sins.
Paul’s audience in the Roman church knows this.
Evolutionary biology is beside the point.
Paul creates a poetic paradigm
to make a point about faith.
His model has an elegant design—
a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
The “first man” Adam has life,
but disobedience leads to death
for himself, for Eve,
for all humankind.
God counters this
with an equal but opposite solution.
The powerful obedience of Jesus
(his faithful death on the cross)
enables the faithful to cancel out
the deadly destiny of sin
and have a new identity and destiny
of righteousness and life
through Jesus Christ.
First Sunday in Lent
February 26, 2023
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
No, we are not bewhiskered woodsmen posing
with a fabled misery whip 12-feet long
emerging from the sepia history of real men
or frugal, gaunt survivalists riding out
the Great Depression or the khaki war machine
fighting to the death against the Axis powers
or fearless astronauts landing on the moon.
As the swaggering first citizens of a unipolar world,
we are soft from indolent years of privileged ease.
We are soft without a great enemy to fight
so we look within and fight among ourselves.
We harden into corpulence and intellectual sloth
as nimbler nations strive to take us down,
not by the savagery of war, but with whispered lies
designed to divide us into two contending camps
dueling to the death of the great American experiment
of broad-shouldered accomplishment of big things.
No, my friend, we are not that nation anymore.
Ash Wednesday
February 22, 2023
Exodus 24:12-18
To the east, news-crawler clouds scrape the mountains,
hiding the higher elevations. A kaleidoscope of rain,
wind, and fog turns and turns again
its swirl of gunmetal gray over the lowlands.
A friend of mine comes from the Great Plains
to the Kent Valley at the beginning of the forty days
of gloom. He wonders: is the air like this always
with these speed-of-a-slug cloud-rags, and the rains?
Today, on day forty-one, the veil is lifted
when cold north winds chase the gray
and set the Cascade Range in clear relief
against the blue, and he is blown away
when Mt. Rainier brandishes its swaggering pride
four thousand meters above the countryside.
Last Sunday After the Epiphany
February 19, 2023
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
The first to speak is the garden soil.
Our hopes depend on fertile land.
Without the soil, we cannot grow.
Land alone is bereft of life.
What we need is healthy seed.
Without the seed, we cannot grow.
Soil and seed are well and good,
but absent rain what’s our gain?
Without the rain, we cannot grow.
The genial sun laughs out loud.
Garden delight depends on light.
Without the sun, we cannot grow.
Surrender your ego for the common good.
Work as one to get it done.
The Holy Spirit gives the growth.
NOTE: St. John’s Episcopal Church, Snohomish, Washington
Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany
February 12, 2023
