Category: Church Year
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The Fourth Sunday of Advent
Year A—December 21, 2025 We are closing in on Christmas! This week’s readings are compact: they get to the point. Sort of. They hold out familiar words and images, and we can walk right in and take those words and images as if from the shelf, and move along our…
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Advent 3
Year A – December 14, 2025 Lectionary readings:Isaiah 35:1-10James 5:7-10Matthew 11:2-11Psalm 146:4-9or Canticle 15 (the Magnificat, or Song of Mary) This icon type, Theotokos of the Sign, depicts the expectant Mary. Her posture is one of prayer, and while her son is still in her womb, we see him as God, arms…
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The First Sunday of Advent
Year A – November 30, 2025 Note: I am beginning a series of blogging on the Sunday Eucharistic lectionary—the Revised Common Lectionary as used in the Episcopal Church—paired with artwork. This project has its origins in bulletins I used to make for St. Andrew’s Church, Livonia, although I wrote much…
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Whose is the kingdom, the power, and the glory?
Holy Week is here again: that annual liturgical reminder of the horrors humans are capable of. We tame it—make it about the provision of a meek and mute divine sacrificial victim to atone for our personal sins. It’s such a familiar story. Our hymnals automatically flip themselves open to “All…
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Even the Dogs Get Crumbs
The Gospel lection for this Sunday (September 8, 2024, in the Episcopal edition of the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, Proper 18) is Mark 7:24-27. It includes two pericopes, including one of the Gospel accounts of the story of a Gentile woman whose child is ill: Jesus set out and…
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First Sunday in Lent
I am not a fan of Lent. There is altogether too much breast-beating for my taste. Or, rather, for my mental and spiritual health. I’m trying to recast it in my own mind, because I know it means so much more. As one of the Proper Prefaces for Lent says,…
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Trying so hard to be ordinary
It’s a weird calendar this year for us church folk. Christmas Eve was on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, and Ash Wednesday will be on Valentine’s Day again. This past Saturday, January 6, was the Feast of the Epiphany—a feast you would think would be transferred to the nearest Sunday,…
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Among Women, Blessed
The following poem, for a long time while I kept revising it, bore the working title, “Closing in on Christmas.” I’m glad my poetry group agreed I should change the title once it found its final form. And now that we’re deep into Christmas, why don’t I share my Advent…
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Full Circle
Today is the second and last time this century that Good Friday and the Feast of the Annunciation fall on the same day. Historically, though, they’re linked. In the earliest centuries of the Church, the death and resurrection of Christ were observed, but Christ’s birth was not. However, the symbolic…
The Sound 