In John 5, Jesus ask a man, who has been blind for 38 years, if he wants to be made well. This is not a question merely about having vision restored, but a question about the desire to have a completely different life- engaged and participating in community in a way that has been denied… Read More
RCL: God Calling
My call story involves an Amy Grant song and Route 128 in Massachusetts. I was already enrolled in a graduate program in Pastoral Ministry. I had been thinking of it as a useful prelude to what I thought I wanted to do: study Jungian psychotherapy. Then, one fall day I found myself driving to the… Read More
RCL: Origin Stories
In her final, beautiful book, the late, luminous Rachel Held Evans wrote, The role of origin stories, both in the ancient Near Eastern culture from which the Old Testament emerged and at that familiar kitchen table where you first learned how your grandparents met, is to enlighten the present by recalling the past. Origin stories… Read More
Friday Prayer
When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” John 5:6 It’s a good question: Do I want to be made well? I don’t mean specifically of physical ailments. I mean: do I want all the things that… Read More
Narrative Lectionary: Word! (John 1:1-18)
“In the beginning,” John starts out, calling us back to creation and the vision of a new creation here. In this new creation, the Word of God is alongside God, a partner is creation, until it takes on flesh. Like the first creation story in Genesis 1, this creation has the feeling of praise-filled poetry. … Read More
Come and See (John 1:35-51)
John 1:35-51 Like in the synoptics, one of the earliest activities of Jesus in John’s gospel is the gathering of disciples. I say “gathering” rather than “calling” because the action is decidedly different as John tells the story. At least in the instance of the first two disciples, Andrew and Simon Peter, Jesus doesn’t go… Read More
