Daring to Be Transfigured

Lent, perhaps more than any other season, gives us permission to focus on our spiritual lives, to take time apart from the everyday demands to listen to what God might be asking of us. Today’s Scripture readings can seem beyond us, describing those events that we might label “Significant Religious Experiences,” things that happen to [...]

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Not Needing to Be Right

A legendary and somewhat humorous epitaph reads, “Here lies the body of Michael O’Day / who died defending the right of way.” We laugh somewhat ruefully because we all know the truth of it. If we admit it, there have been times in all our lives when we’ve been willing to go to extremes to [...]

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Taking on Great Responsibility

A lot of mental and emotional interference takes place when we hear the readings for this feast. People tend to focus on the line from the Letter to Colossians about wives being subordinate to their husbands, or parents and children exchange looks at the line, “Children, obey your parents in everything.” Most of us don’t [...]

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Choosing Good Leaders

Our strong roots in democracy don’t give us particularly good background for understanding the biblical concept of kingship. Living as we do in one of the first countries to reject rule by a monarch in favor of a federation of independent states, we balk at the idea of locating all authority in one person. From [...]

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Crumbs from Your Table

Sometimes the stories from the Gospels have become such a part of our cultural heritage that we don’t really hear them. Sunday’s parable of the Rich Man (sometimes called Dives) and Lazarus is one of those stories. The rich man neglects the poor beggar at his door, they both die, one goes to heaven, the [...]

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The big letting go

All week in the lectionary we’ve been hearing the story of Abraham. His choice to enter into a covenant with God set the course for the Chosen People. His story is their story—and ours. We are heirs to the promise made to Abraham and the greater promise fulfilled in Christ. The Akedah (the binding [...]

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Burning our Plows

The lectionary readings for this 13th Sunday of the year, at least the first and the third, are linked by the image of a plow. In the reading from Kings, Elijah calls Elisha to follow him by throwing his mantle over his shoulders. Elisha leaves his plow and tells the great prophet, “Let me [...]

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When ‘I don’t know’ is a dodge

How often have you said, “I don’t know” when what you really mean is, “I don’t want to say” or “I’m afraid to admit it”? We deny the truth to others, perhaps even to ourselves, and in doing so we lose a little bit of the authority that comes to us through the virtues of [...]

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One of those days

Have you ever had one of those days? A day when nothing seems to go right and you’re feeling increasingly out of sorts? All too often we take out our frustration on someone or something that just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You yell at the kids, or the [...]

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