Good morning Christians, seekers, and friends! How are you? Isn’t this time of year just glorious in Seattle? As a quick look at my bulletin letter will show, I am obsessed with Seattle’s flowering trees and plants lately. Their blooms, fragrance, and abundant beauty in our wonderful city overwhelms me. I get a similar feeling
Miracles Growing!
Why We Need the Body of Christ
Last Sunday we talked about moral blindness. We talked about how moral blindness causes us to have moral blind spots, like driving blind spots, except for our spiritual life, in ways that inhibit our relationships. We defined moral blindness as: an unconscious barrier produced externally from ourselves, that inhibits us from seeing our actions clearly,
Higher Love
Good morning Christians, seekers, and friends: So, a friend thought it would be funny if I were to begin my sermon today that old joke “A priest, a rabbi, and minister walk into a bar….” And she assured me that if I did so, she would laugh out loud. So, I thought, what the heck?
Hallelujah!
As we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ tonight, the word that marks this moment is hallelujah. It means praise God, which is sort of odd to say praise God as a way of praising God. The truth is hallelujah is a rather untranslatable word: it is more a guttural affirmation; a mysterious proclamation; a
Jesus’ New Commandment
Good evening Christians, seekers, and friends, I wonder what it would be like for someone who doesn’t really know much about Christianity to come into the Church tonight. At this point, a little over eighty percent of the American populace knows that Easter celebrates Resurrection but what, exactly, this means to those of us who
Sewing Community Together by Faith
We have a very familiar story today in the Gospel of Mark. It is the story of Jesus riding victoriously into Jerusalem; people spread their cloaks on the street, they lay palm branches on the ground, and wave them over their heads. They cry out: “Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is the one that comes
Pilgrimages From Home
Not long before the pandemic began last year, some fantastic Epiphanites loaned me three books before we knew what would unfold during these intervening 12 months. “A year later, these three books (kept in Ziploc bags as I do since I worked in a bookstore where we could read any book for free as long
Confrontng Evil When it Lives in the Light
I’ve finished a book recently called The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. It’s a story of a young girl whose brother dies and mother abandons her into foster care. It takes place in Germany during WWII. The town she lands in is Molching, with a family living on the wrong side of the tracks, barely
Aunt Maria and Zeal
“Zeal for your house will consume me.” That is a word I get excited about, zeal. It is a word that gets a bad rap—a zealot, a person blindly compelled by an idea, irrespective of its costs, particularly cost to relationship. I believe zeal means just the opposite. I believe zeal is all about relationship.