Hildegard of Bingen During the season of Lent in my congregation, we are hearing from the “cloud of witnesses.” Each week we follow along with guides who are helping us through the season. We are listening both to contemporary and…
Read MoreAsh Wednesday
Ash Wednesday “In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die. Where you invest your love, you invest your life. Awake my soul.” — Mumford and Sons Today is the day. Ash Wednesday. We begin the trek…
Read MoreEpiphany XV
We incorporate (take into the body) all kinds of memories, postures and gestures that do work quite apart from or despite our best thinking or rational attempts to change. Many of the practices (and wisdom) of the body happen at unconscious and preverbal levels. The way we hold ourselves and move through space entails a deep sort of “knowing” that we rarely think about or notice.
Read MoreEpiphany XIII
This week the Gospel reading holds one of the hardest sayings of Jesus. At least for me. Matthew 5:43-44: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” This one is hard not so much because I have a lot of clearly defined enemies. Although I suppose I do have a few. And no doubt, I’ve made some.
Read MoreEpiphany XI
Hospitality (Part III) Yesterday I was in a conversation about a stunning new book by Willie Jennings who teaches theology at Duke Divinity School. In 2010, Jennings published The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale). Here is a link…
Read MoreEpiphany VII
And we need healing from so many things in our lives. The very religious traditions that shape us are broken and sometimes do more harm than good. The institutions and the texts themselves stand in need of healing. The light of the Christ candle was taken symbolically to places in the sanctuary where those gathered could receive healing touch or light a candle to honor their own deep need or the needs of others. It is a standing invitation. . .
Read MoreEpiphany IV
Prayer and Anxiety On Sunday morning I will teach six- seven- and eight-year-olds something about prayer. Or they may teach me. Later this week I’ll begin a two week intensive journey of learning together with a group of adults about…
Read MoreAdvent VI
But finding a book in the mail stack or on the front porch is nothing unusual. The surprise in this book today was the author. And the topic. The real surprise is that I had overlooked this book for so long.
It has been 11 years since I first sat down in silence and began the practice of centering prayer. It has been 20 years since I first sat down in a classroom with Dr. Wayne Oates to learn the tasks and the art of pastoral care. It has been more than 30 years since he wrote Nurturing Silence in a Noisy Heart. I was still in middle school.
Read MoreAdvent III
St. John’s Abbey church is an amazing cavern with a multi-story wall of honeycomb shaped windows. Each pane is filled with abstract shapes and color. They grow more beautiful as morning light rises. However, this morning the beauty cannot outweigh the exclusivity and harm of the words and deeds of the tradition itself.
Read MoreAdvent II
What are we going to do with Jesus?
A dozen or more years ago I was invited to be on a panel of Baptist leaders in Georgia to forecast the future of our kind of Baptists (the moderate and progressive kind). I was too young and inexperienced to do much forecasting. And I’d been asked mostly out of tokenism. They needed to have at least one woman say something.
Read MoreOrdinary Time XXVIII
This Sunday some of us will hear from Luke’s gospel of Jesus. It is a parable about praying. It starts like this. . . . Luke 18:9-10: He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray
Read MoreOrdinary Time XVIII
Last time I checked in, I was still in a state of dazed confusion. But grateful for the disorientation of not knowing and on my way to part two of the celebration of Eid ul-fitr. My pastors and I had been at a gathering of several thousand Muslims for their prayer service following on the end of Ramadan.
Read MoreOrdinary Time XVII
Cultural Daze (Part I): I’m not in culture shock exactly. But I do feel a bit dazed after spending most of yesterday in situations where everything was new and unfamiliar to me. I was in a minority. I stood out in ways that made me feel uncomfortable. I did not understand most of what I heard or saw. I tried to prepare, but reading and asking a few questions was not adequate. I tried to participate, but I kept feeling like I was getting things wrong. In fact I was getting things wrong.
Read MoreEaster IX
Tomorrow Pentecost begins. The birthday of the church! At my church we’ll wear red and celebrate the coming of the Spirit with wind and fire and bells. But right now it is the last day of Eastertide. On Good Friday, April 2, our family and some friends spent a good portion of the day putting in a quarter acre garden. The Great Flood of Nashville hit a month later May 1-3. We suffered very little damage to personal property. With the exception of the garden. It was under eight-to-ten feet of water for most of two days. And it was pretty well destroyed.
Read MoreEaster VII
A Decade of practice: This year feels like a series of milestones in a way. Why do we think that 10 years makes a difference? Why not nine years? or 12 and 1/2? Nonetheless. It was during the last few months of 1999 when my full-time work in and for a congregation came to an end. And a new vocation, or really a revised longer-term vocation, began to take shape. I started graduate school in the fall of 2000 and began learning the practices of becoming a scholar. This is scholarship that I understand to be for the sake of the church.
Read MoreEaster III
One of the best gifts we can give to people is to ask them “How did God’s presence get you through that tough spot in your life?” This was the advice of sociologist and self-described “immigrant in practical theology” Nancy Ammerman. Nancy gave the opening key note address at the Association for Practical Theology last Friday evening.
Read MoreLent III
“On practicing Our Faith” On practice. On practicing our faith. On practicing our faith with the Jesus story.
Where exactly are we in the Jesus story, right about now? Let’s try to locate ourselves on our journey through the Jesus story. The lectionary. You recall what that is: the list of scriptures that reaches out across the Christian landscape and leads us week by week and season by season through each church year. Each year we follow the Jesus story in the Gospel readings . . .
