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Poetry in the Stocks   I quite enjoyed today’s Lectionary readings. They appeal to the English major in me. First, there’s that ripping great yarn about the enslaved fortuneteller and the jailbreak that wasn’t—talk about opening the gates!—and then a succession of poetic bits attributed to John. First about the Paul and Silas story. I love that it all started with this girl annoying them. They didn’t rebuke the spirit out of love for the slave but out of exasperation. She was driving them up the wall. The love of God can work with our exasperation, and so she was released from her bondage to the divination spirit. Of course, the enslavers were upset, and that landed Paul and Silas in jail, a place they were probably becoming familiar with by then. One thing I find remarkable about in this story is that not just Paul and Silas but all the prisoners stayed put when the walls came down. The jailer assumed they would all leave. I mean, wouldn’t you? He was ready to commit hara-kiri...
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Open the Gates

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  “We must obey God rather than any human authority.” Today's lesson from the Acts of the Apostles is a story about speech, about the authorities trying to hush it up and the Apostles speaking anyway. Their civil disobedience could come with a high price, as Stephen was soon to discover. Yet they kept on speaking, accusing the powers that be of doing away with an innocent man and asserting that this man was the Messiah, the Son of God, and that he had returned from the dead. Human authority these days is also trying to muzzle dissent, ordering scholars not to express any opinions contrary to what the current administration wants to hear. Our authorities will imprison or deport people for their words. It will hold research hostage for promoting inclusion. It will even delete any mention of diversity or the climate from its own websites so as to pretend that discrimination and global warming don’t exist. A college friend of mine, Queer Theology professor Peter Carlson wrote this ...
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  Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets! What would that look like? Imagine a bunch of random people out in the streets, prophesying at the office, at Market Basket, in West High School. Imagine everywhere you look, there’s someone filled with the Spirit of God and proclaiming truth to everyone around them. Officials would probably call it mass hysteria. Someone might even call the police. How about random people doing deeds of power in Jesus’ name, people who don’t even go to church maybe, healing the sick and casting out demons with the name of Jesus? How would we feel about that? Would we react like Jesus does, saying don’t stop them because if they’re not against us they must be for us? Or would we feel threatened, feel like our special privileges were being infringed upon? Would we ask to see their Confirmation certificates? Would we try to sign them up for a program? What would we do about such chaotic behavior? In the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel today, we...
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Sermon on the Good Shepherd

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Ancient shepherds were pretty bad-ass, when you think about it, even though they held a very low status in society. Imagine being all by yourself with a hundred head of   pretty foolish livestock to protect. Imagine you don’t have a gun, just a rod and a staff—basically a couple of big sticks—and your flock is in constant danger from wolves, and lions, and rustlers who try to jump the portable fence you’ve put up for the night. Imagine there’s no closing gate to this temporary enclosure, just you with your two sticks, sleeping in the opening, so anything coming to trouble the sheep will have to go through you. And then when day comes, your job is to call each sheep by its name—and every one of them has a name—and lead them all to good pasture, walking in front, where you’re the first to face any hazard. Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep.   All who came before me  are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whe...
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  “There was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out…”                                               Mark 1:23                                                   We don’t call them demons anymore When you’re raving, howling out your reality To the pious void. In our less benighted time, This is not an unclean spirit but a case Of schizophrenia, a distressing medical phenomenon Treatable with the new alchemy of neurotransmitters. You don’t Need an exorcism. Take your meds. Be silent and come out. And yet, There is some verity that will not be quieted, even With Lithium. The words Of the rebuked disorder are Recorded for the ears of generations. While those in their right m...
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  The Feast of Christ the King November 26, 2023 Those poor goats. What did they do to be cast as the bad guys? Goats are nice animals. They’re very helpful to humans. It doesn’t seem fair to make them a metaphor for all things mean and unjust. Well, a lot of Jesus’ parables use these kinds of absolute binaries: wise vs. foolish bridesmaids, wheat vs. weeds, sons who give lip service vs. sons who get the job done. Binary options like this accentuate contrasts between ideas. In the real world, of course, things are rarely black and white. Interestingly, some sheep breeds common in that part of the world look quite a bit like goats, and they are often grazed together. Separating them may require the Shepherd’s practiced eye. More about sheep and goats later. This last Sunday before Advent is known as the Feast of Christ the King, so I want to start with some thoughts on that idea. Once on a Christ the King Sunday in the Diocese of Chicago—the land of smells, bells and well-...
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  Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52: Five Parables of the Kingdom   This week’s Gospel lesson is a whole boatload of parables about the Kingdom of Heaven, something Jesus talked a lot about but never described in plain words. He told little stories and vignettes about what it was like, stories that may seem simple on first reading, but the more you think about them, the less obvious their meaning becomes. If there’s one thing these particular parables have in common, it may be the idea that the Kingdom of Heaven is something that requires patience. The word “parable” literally means putting one thing beside another. It’s not as clearly defined as an allegory, in which every image has a direct, one-to-one symbolic meaning. Parables simply set two ideas in juxtaposition and let the listener sort out the similarities. The earliest versions we have of most of the parables of Jesus do not include explanations; these were likely added by later editors in the communities where the Gosp...
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