Bible Women and War 1 Warfare has been a constant as long as human beings have roamed the earth. The sad truth is this: war happens. We do everything we can to avoid it, but combat occurs, both in distant parts of the world, and in our own towns (Orlando, Beirut, Minneapolis, Aleppo, New York, etc.). What might we learn from Bible women regarding warfare and conflict?...
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Excerpts from a sermon at St. David's, Minnetonka, Minnesota...
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This Sunday's readings pop up like water in a dry stretch: both the Old Testament and the Gospel reading are about widows and sons. In both readings, when the mothers are in deep despair over death and approaching death, the sons are granted new life and health. Here's the first story: The widow of Zarephath. An outsider, a woman, and a widow, she’s...
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I lost my mother to cancer when I was eleven. And still I yearn for her voice. I mourn that my memories of her are limited; I keep reviewing the moments I can remember, and there are no new ones. When she died, the warmth left our house. Even though an older woman, Lucille, was hired to keep house and to...
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It seems that the world has been filled with purple this week in memory of Prince…but for those of us who love stories of women in the Bible, the color purple also belongs to Lydia. And Lydia comes up this Sunday, in the RSV lectionary. Lydia’s biblical story, recounted in Acts 16:13-15, begins near water outside the town of Philippi, where...
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Why does Martha of Bethany have such a bad reputation? Because she’s so organized? Because she complained to Jesus? (I like that about her; it takes some chops to complain to The Guy.) Here’s the well-known part of her story (Luke 10:38-42): Martha is cooking dinner for Jesus and the disciples. Sister Mary is sitting at Jesus’ feet, listening. Martha needs...
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One of the things I like about Mary Magdalene is her willingness to look into the darkness—whether it be her own demons or the darkness of the empty tomb. In John 20, my favorite account of the resurrection, Mary Magdalene sees that the stone blocking the entrance to the tomb has been moved. She runs to tell Peter, who looks inside, sees nothing, and returns home. She...
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My goodness. Dreams in scripture are a big deal. They’re all over the place in the Old and New Testaments…twenty-one of them to be exact,* not including various visions…and only one is reported by a woman. The woman is, of course, Pontius Pilate’s wife. Remembered as a saint in the Greek Orthodox Church, she is also seen as a possible secret...
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No human being in the New Testament, besides Jesus, listens better than Mary of Bethany. As we go deeper into Lent and come closer to the cross, consider the unmatched gift she gave him: the deep and profound gift of listening. And it’s not just a gift for him—for through her endeavor, we learn how profoundly active and passionate real...
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My mother-in-law always grieved Leonard, her tall and handsome father. She was three when he died; he was twenty-eight. He was a millworker in the woolen mills of Lawrence: young and healthy one week and gone the next. Family history says that he went into Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in 1918, thirty long miles away, and "didn’t come out." Best...
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