On Holy Ground: Nathan and the Unnamed Woman
Excerpts from a sermon at St. David's, Minnetonka, Minnesota...
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DNA Does Not a Mother Make
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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Martha of Bethany: Finding the Main Course
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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Mary Magdalene: Peering into the darkness
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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Pontius Pilate’s Wife: “Listen to Me!”
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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Lent Three: Loving Leonard
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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Lent One: Bible Women and Suffering–Judges 19
Many women in the Bible suffer, caught in the midst of unimaginably harsh choices and pain. Think of the woman in Judges 19, whom we'll look at today. Most Christians do not know her story, and are surprised to find it in scripture. We’ve swept the pieces of it—and her—under the collective Judeo-Christian rug for 3000 years now. And she's not the...
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Sons on Death’s Doorstep
Let’s be real. Everyone knows the story of Abraham, but how about the comparable story of the widow of Zarephath? Both were about sacrifice and beloved sons. Abraham delivered his son Isaac to the funeral pyre—and would have killed the boy, had not God’s angel intervened. The widow of Zarephath also saw her son on death’s doorstop, although—unlike Abraham—such a condition...
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Mary: What’s she done for you lately?
For the better part of forty years, Mary didn’t do anything for me. And that sounds like something a loser would say: “Hey, Mary didn’t do anything for me…” Except, of course, she did something that no one has ever done; something that no one else will ever do. She gave birth to Jesus, the Prince of Peace, the Redeemer. Surely...
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Freckles and Short-Shorts
She had freckles on her face. She kept standing up to tug her short-shorts down; they pinched her, she said. She told me her name was “Josi,” without an “e.” And that she was eleven, in middle school, and that her school was “really safe — “that nothing ever happens there.” Her long legs would make her a good tree-climber. I hope she...
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