Daily Office Readings – NT ( Romans 12:1-8 ) The first few verses in this passage in Romans are often cited when people want to encourage others to focus on the good things, and to avoid the bad. In my experience, churches that focus on holiness tend to emphasize this passage, and, often, include the…
Daily Office Readings – NT ( Hebrews 13:17-25 ) I’ve been involved in various Christian churches since birth. At one point in my life, I belonged to a particular denomination that closely resembled the Catholic/Anglican/Episcopal traditions, but wasn’t related to any of them. They were a blend of the charismatic, the evangelical and the liturgical,…
Daily Office Gospel ( John 7:1-13 ) A few things jumped out at me in today’s reading. One was that Jesus’ brothers told him to go to Judea and do miracles there where people could see him. That first bit about his brothers gets into a theological argument that has nothing to do with Jesus’…
Daily Office Readings – Gospel ( John 6:41-51 ) Today’s passage in the Gospel is one of those readings that features quite a bit in our understanding of the Eucharist because Jesus equates his body with the bread from heaven, with the living bread, with the bread that gives eternal life. These few verses are…
Daily Office Readings – NT ( Hebrews 11:1-12 ) As I read through the New Testament reading for today, the same two words kept jumping out at me: “by faith,” “by faith,” “by faith,” kind of like the steady beating of a drum. (Or a hammer on my thick skull, perhaps…) The other thing that…
Daily Office Readings Gospel ( John 4:43-54 ) Every now and again I hear people talking about “putting faith into action.” It is generally when they are talking about going out to do some sort of service project, because we tend to equate a defined set of rules to live by with Faith. Sure, there’s…
Daily Office Readings – Gospel (John 2:1-12) Today’s gospel reading is about the wedding in Cana. I’ve always marveled at this bit of scripture. First, when younger, that Jesus turned water into wine. Then, as I got older, and I started drinking wine myself, I became amazed at how much normal human behavior is found…
I’ve been working my way through Paul Tillich’s collection of sermons in The Eternal Now, and came to the sermon entitled Forgetting and Being Forgotten. Tillich says the following: Forgetting is probably more difficult for a religious tradition than any other human heritage. But God is not only the beginning from which we came; He…
Daily Office Readings – Gospel (John 10:7-17) In today’s reading, Jesus gets confronted by the Pharisees who tell him that because he is testifying on his own behalf, his testimony is not valid. The law, it seems, requires at least two witnesses to make a testimony valid. And Jesus says he has a witness, and…
Lectionary Readings – (The Epiphany) When most people hear the word epiphany, the don’t think of the twelfth day after Christmas, or about the story of the wise men coming from various lands to see the baby Jesus. Instead, when most people think of the word epiphany, they think of an “aha!” moment like when…