The BMPA Christmas Pageant 2016
UNLIKELY MESSENGERS: A Christmas Pageant Brown Memorial Park Avenue Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD * See PDF file for complete stage directions. * SPENCER: Welcome to the Christmas Pageant everybody! It’s a very old story but we believe there is always something new to hear in it. That’s partly because we are different every year. […]
Angel, Unannounced
I wish angels gave some warning as to their arrival, especially this one. Gabriel is the slayer angel – God’s warrior. I only know this because a rabbi responded with shock the first time he heard the details of this story from Luke. We were standing outside the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth looking […]
Unlikely Messengers: John The Baptist
In those days, John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” I love how Matthew introduces John this way, like some kind of apparition or magic trick. One day there was only desert, hard-scrabble sand and stone, no living thing visible to the naked eye, […]
The Power of Light
Isaiah looked around at his world and saw mostly bad news. Cities burned with fire (1:7). Land devoured by other nations (1:7). A nation on the verge of destruction like Sodom and Gomorrah (1:9). Most of the first 39 chapters of Isaiah tell some version of that story – verse after verse of doom and […]
One is Better Than Zero
I used to think God’s noticing is what sets God apart. That God notices our suffering or others’ even when we don’t. That God has an almost infrared ability to pick up on the silent suffering of others, to notice it with few clues or evidence. I think that may be true about God – […]
Playing Favorites
Will Campbell preached his first sermon at the tender age of seventeen, in a tiny wooden church tucked between farms on the outer edges of Liberty, Mississippi. He was skinny and nervous and looked it. He placed his grandfather’s pocket watch on the lectern in front of him so he wouldn’t ramble on too long […]
Where Do We Go From Here?
“This is a deserted place,” the disciples tell Jesus. Not just the physical space away from the crowds, away from people. But the space they have entered after Jesus gets the worst news you can imagine. The kind of news that you wake up to everyday wishing it was just a dream. The kind of […]
The Bull of Heaven
It was early in the formation of “Imago Dei,” the name we gave for the gay straight alliance at Columbia Seminary that my friend caught me off guard with a comment on this Psalm. “The first time I remember reading this psalm,” she told me, “I remember how disturbed I was.” She caught me off […]
Orthodox Generosity
On facebook this week I came across a video from a Toronto ad agency featuring Canadians concerned about our elections. “As you’re thinking about your future,” they say, “we just want you to know that you guys are great.”[1] Reaching into our past the Canadians offer examples they believe set us apart – from our […]
The Days Are Surely Coming
There was this moment when Andrew and I realized that we had lined up a sermon series based on children’s books for the final six weeks of the Presidential Election. This was not an intentional decision. We organized these dates maybe six months ago, when the election didn’t feel so…visceral. We were thinking…fall. New school […]