Let’s hear it for mediocrity.
Let us celebrate just getting by. Let us commend doing less than your best. Let us extol what in the college I went to they called “gentleman’s Cs.” Let us praise doing okay, satisfactory, good enough.
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Read MoreWelcome, children of God, holy and beloved.
Modern Protestant Christianity is a long on strategy and short on tactics. Or to be more churchy: long on theology and short on practices. Or what Christianity calls disciplines: things we can do to live the kind of faithful life we would like to live. It is great to know that we are justified by God’s grace, but now what? What do we do day to day, hour to hour, knowing we have been freed from the power of death?
Read MoreLet’s not make Mary out to be too sweet. Let’s not put her in a beautiful blue robe (why is it always blue?), with blushing cheeks and flowing hair, a contemplative smile, and a halo-like glow surrounding her.
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Read MoreIt seems that a confluence of factors has put the stress-o-meter off the scale. I know that because I can see stress in your faces and the faces of just about everyone I know. I hear it in your voices and the voices of others. I see it in your lives and the lives of others.
Read MoreWhat is your name?
In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts your name is what you are known by. If you decide to change your name from Fred to Ferdinand you just tell everyone you meet that your name is Ferdinand. And it is. No need to go to court or post listing in the paper or anything like that. According to the law, your name is not unchangeable and inherent, but depends on your actions (telling and using your name) and on your choices. It says something about you, or can.
Read MoreRobert Pirsig, in his classic book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, coins the term “gumption trap.” A gumption trap is where you find yourself when you have done everything you can and things still don’t work. It happens when you cannot figure out how to get that stupid bearing back in its seat or that rusted retainer off the bolt. But he means it to be more than a mechanic’s frustration. It is a kind of trap of the mind, where all roads seems to be dead ends, where you can’t find your way out of the mess you are in, where it seems that the forces are aligned against you, or at least out of your control. It feels like urgent, anxious desperation.
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Read MoreIt is one thing to make an example of your friend. It is another thing altogether to be there at his graveside.
There is a back-story to today’s reading in the Gospel of John. A couple of days earlier someone had brought a message to Jesus. His friend Lazarus was ill. Lazarus was the brother of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed Jesus with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair. The sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” But when Jesus heard about it, he said to his disciples, “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” And therefore, John reports, although Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, he stayed two days longer before he left to see him.
Read MoreThis is a big day for Martin Luther. We sing hymns that he wrote, and we hear his words quoted. The Lutheran church worldwide is especially proud of Martin Luther on this day, and will celebrate the day more energetically than most other Protestant denominations. You would be forgiven if you thought that the name of this day was Martin Luther Sunday.
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Read MoreLast week the Greater Boston Food Bank held a luncheon for the people who work in what they call agencies. The Food Bank is where we get almost all our food for Faith Kitchen, and we are an agency. An agency is some organization that feeds people by giving them food or serving them meals, as Faith Kitchen does. Once a month someone from Faith goes down to the Food Bank in Boston, loads cases of fresh, canned, and frozen food into a van, and brings it back here so we can make meals for hungry people. Every month we pick up between 300 and 600 pounds of food. It costs us anywhere from nothing to $30 for all that food.
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Read MoreThe Pharisees were wise in the ways of the world. They knew what’s what. They weren’t babes in the woods. They had been around. They weren’t born yesterday.
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