Tag: Christianity
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The First Sunday after Christmas
Year A—December 28, 2025 I feel for preachers. My instinct is to try to draw something out of each of these texts and weave it all together…but what hasn’t already been said about these passages? Not only does Christmas recycle John’s Prologue every year in multiple services, but it’s just…
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Christmas Day
Selection I—All Years Merry Christmas! [There are three different sets of readings for Christmas Day. In my experience—admittedly, only with cathedrals—the first set is used on Christmas Eve, while the second and third are used in services on Christmas Day. Since they don’t change from year to year, my intention…
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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 II
Year A—December 6, 2025 Readings:Isaiah 11:1-10Romans 15:4-13Matthew 3:1-12Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19 A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,and a branch shall grow out of his roots. So begins the reading from Isaiah this week. Christians have understood this passage in light of Jesus, who the Gospel writers cast as…
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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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The Lord is risen indeed!
Alleluia! Something truly unprecedented has happened. God has become human: fully human and fully divine. I don’t know what that means, exactly. It’s unprecedented. Then, this God-man died. Men—well, people of all genders, and also all living things—die all the time. But God? It’s unprecedented. Now he’s back. And honestly?…
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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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I disagree with myself ALL THE TIME.
In grad school, I attended an inter-religious consortium of seminaries and institutes. One term while taking a class over at the Unitarian Universalist seminary, I recall telling a UU classmate that I am a “Trinitarian Universalist.” That might well be a fancy way to say “Episcopalian,” although I doubt it.…
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Lift Every Voice for Charleston
I have a friend who believes the correct response to whatever befalls a community of faith is: “What, then, shall we sing?” This morning in church, many of us throughout the United States joined in solidarity with the congregation at Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC by…
The Sound 