The Word

How do I love thee Let me count the ways I love thee to the depth and breadth and heightmy soul can reach when feeling out of sightfor the ends of being and ideal grace These tender words of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning reflect a bit of the all-encompassing character of human love But hu

On the first Sunday of Lent we reflected on the covenant that God made with the entire created world Last week we pondered the covenant promises God made to Abraham and his descendants Today we consider one aspect of yet a third covenantthe law associated with the covenant God made through Moses T

Last Sunday we reflected on our covenant relationship with the created world Today we consider the covenant promises made to Abraham Though often referred to as ldquo The Sacrifice of Isaac rdquo the story might be better named ldquo The Testing of Abraham rdquo The first line of the first r

I never cease to be amazed at how much difficulty people have with the directive Take your places please And it is not just children who cannot seem to follow it Try to get graduate students to form a line for commencement Many of our problems stem from our inability to know our place or stay

Last Sunday we reflected on the new life that forgiveness from God and from others can offer us We saw that if we are the ones forgiven we must change our ways so that we no longer offend if we are the ones forgiving we must refrain from bringing up time and again the offense that caused us to s

The phrase ldquo Give it up rdquo signals two very different practices which are part of two equally different occasions The more recent meaning is a call to applaud a musical or dramatic performance of quality the traditional understanding is a summons to penance particularly during Lent As

We have many expressions for assuring each other that the mistakes we have made will not be held against us The most familiar include ldquo I forgive you rdquo ldquo Don rsquo t worry about it rdquo ldquo That rsquo s O K rdquo and more recently ldquo No problem rdquo These are simpl

Sometimes we may be willing to support good works as long as they are not set up in our neighborhood It may be true that property value plummets when someone opens a halfway house or a hospice around the corner This decline in value may also happen when the owners of that trendy ethnic restaurant

Job seems so pessimistic Life is a drudgery I am assigned months of misery I am filled with restlessness Will this ever end And in the next breath he declares My days are swifter than a weaver rsquo s shuttle my life is like the wind Where did the time go nbsp And that is the long and sho

God seems to choose the most unlikely people to proclaim the good news a prophet who tried to escape his call and was carried to his ministry in the belly of a large fish simple fishermen who knew a lot about bait and nets but little about preaching a tent-maker who became a disciple when the po