“In all things…”
Genesis 50:15-21 The first eleven chapters of Genesis are what some scholars call “Hebrew Mythology.” The term “mythology,” contrary to popular usage, doesn’t make any judgment about the truth or factuality of a story. It just means a story in which a divine being interacts directly with humans. In the […]
“What Went Wong?”
Genesis 3:1-24 About 25 years ago, Bill Moyers and Rabbi Burt Visotzky gathered a group of scholars and artists—men and women, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and even (if I remember correctly) an atheist or two—to talk about Genesis. It was sort of an interfaith take on the Jewish interpretive method […]
“… a paradise that makes me think of two… “
Genesis 2:4-9, 15-25 (Sermon title is from “Old Man” by Neil Young, from his 1970 album Harvest.) We are learning some interesting lessons from the current pandemic. One is that nobody really likes wearing masks. In the summer when it’s hot and humid, they’re downright unpleasant. One of my masks […]
“No Expiration Date, Good Anywhere”
Revelation 21:1-7 I’ve never been all that great with coupons. When I was in college, and first out of college, and didn’t have a whole lot of money, I clipped coupons religiously. Every Sunday when the paper came I would pull out the slick stuff and cut out the coupons […]
“How Does He Do It?”
Matthew 5:17-20; Philippians 2:5-11 The subject I decided to preach on today, covenant and the Atonement of Christ, is way too big to address in a single sermon. I probably could teach a semester-long class on it and barely scratch the surface. One of my seminary professors has written an […]
“Same as It Ever Was”
Jeremiah 31:31-34; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 During the lockdown I enrolled in an online class offered through EdX, taught by a Harvard professor named Shaye Cohen. The class was called “Judaism Through Its Scriptures,” and it covered not just the Hebrew Bible but the Talmud and various other rabbinic commentaries that […]
“Preach This Every Sunday”
Isaiah 57:14-19 In one of the early episodes of Father Brown, two middle-aged women are found murdered, and at each crime scene a cryptic note is left, a series of numbers and a Bible reference. Father Brown, who is homebound with a broken leg, eventually figures out what the cryptic […]
“Plan B, C, D…”
Jeremiah 18:1-11 When my sister and I were kids, we and the other neighbor kids—there were almost a dozen of us at one point—used to spend a lot of time playing in the creek that ran behind our house. One summer, we discovered that in one place in the creekbank […]
“The End Is Not the End”
Isaiah 11:1-16 It’s safe to say we—not just in the United States but all of Western civilization—are living in a cataclysmic time right now. That’s not just because we are in the middle of a pandemic, a brand-new infectious disease that we are learning about in real time, just figuring […]
“Far from Home”
Deuteronomy 29:16 — 30:14 If you have even a nodding acquaintance with Irish and Scottish folk music, you know that emigration and exile are pretty prominent parts of the tradition. Both of those countries, under English control, ended up seeing many of their people leave, for a variety of reasons. […]
“A Nickel is a Nickel and a Dime is a Dime”
Hosea 1:2-9 “Hesitation Blues” is a very early blues song, probably most famously recorded by Jelly Roll Morton in the 1920s. Some people claim Jelly Roll wrote it, but it appears to be traditional, and there are several versions of it out there that were published before Morton’s; and lots […]
“This Is Who I Am”
Exodus 33:12 – 34:9 Thursday night, after my Zoom class ended, I went downstairs and joined Mike, who was watching TV. First he was watching something about the philosophy and practice of “eugenics” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which was wildly popular in the United States until […]