Again and again, God does new things. Again and again, we sing new songs.

One God, three persons. The Trinity is a mystery.

But we can learn about God by learning about ourselves — about the world the Father created, about the humanity the Son became part of, about the Spirit who still moves in the world today.

Good… Created in God's image… We matter to God… God loves us whether we’re useful or not… God’s love comes first….

Today, we remember the day the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus’s disciples with “a sound like the rush of a violent wind” and with “tongues, as of fire”... the day the Apostle Peter stood up to speak, and reached back for the words of the Prophet Joel: “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy..."

The question sounds a bit like criticism, but I’m not sure that’s fair. Because what those two figures in white robes are really doing is ...

What does faith offer when God feels far away, unknown, even unknowable?

“Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.” Stone is a curious spiritual metaphor. If you look closely, though, you’ll find stone everywhere in scripture.

In 1937, the German secret police shut down a seminary in a town called Finkenwalde. For the two years the seminary operated, the students and teachers in Finkenwalde knew that they were under threat. But still they prayed together, studied together, and ate together.

The book of Acts speaks of a community that seems utopian: "they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.” I think they were simply living a Christian life.

Look again at what the book of Acts is actually describing.

Christ walks with us even when we don’t recognize him. Even when we’re walking in the wrong direction. Even when we’re running away. Christ walks with us even when all hope seems lost.

I love the Prayer of St. Francis, but I think we too often get the logic of grace backwards. “Make us instruments of your peace.” We often understand those words in a way that puts us at the center of the action. As if we alone can carry peace into rooms where hatred lives. As if we alone bear the responsibility of driving out doubt and despair and sadness wherever we find them.

Easter Day

I love Easter, but Easter’s tricky. We try to turn it into something tame. But really, there’s nothing tame about Easter.

A Sermon for Maundy Thursday

Everything we do tonight does actually have one purpose, one focus.

The edge of a tomb can be a hard place to talk about hope...

A man was blind. Jesus gave him sight. You’d think that’s the whole story. But John gives us thirty more verses after the healing, telling us about what happens when people who think they understand how the world works are confronted with something that doesn’t fit what they already believe.

It doesn’t go well.

Think about the last time you were outside at night. Not in town — somewhere dark. Really dark.

It takes a while for your eyes to adjust. At first, you can’t see much of anything. But if you wait — if you resist the urge to flood the darkness with light — things start to take shape....

I think about Nicodemus standing outside in that kind of darkness.

Somewhere along the way, we convince ourselves that the wrong thing is the reasonable thing, the necessary thing, the only realistic option. We lose the moral clarity that children have.

Sometimes a childlike clarity is exactly what we need. But even when the right answer isn’t quite so clear, the call is still ours.

Our lives are finite. But they matter. What we do matters.

The psalm we read this morning doesn’t pretend that the troubles of the world aren’t real, or that they won’t affect us. But it does make a claim: The uproar won’t get the last word.

Hold on to that promise as we go up the mountain with Jesus, Peter, James, and John.

But it’s what happens next that I want to focus on....