August 29, 2021 Genesis 1:1-5; Psalm 33:6-11; Ephesians 1:17-19; John 1:1-5, John 9 We have a favorite cartoon on our refrigerator that we keep there because it so absolutely captures Greg and me. If you don’t know Pickles, you should. The characters are about our age, a long-married couple who are showing signs of what our doctor euphemistically calls “age-appropriate” decline. But the panel that’s on our fridge has been appropriate throughout all our years of living toge

August 25, 2021 Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 42; Ephesians 2:17-22; John 4:3-30, 39-42 As the story opens, Jesus is on the road again, this time traveling north, and the route he’s chosen takes him through Samaria—today’s Palestinian West Bank—as rough a neighborhood then as now, and as ‘foreign’ and hostile to Jews of Jesus’ time as it is to Jews today. At midday Jesus and his friends come to a well with a long history. Jacob had dug it and had willed it to his son Joseph. When th

August 15, 2021 Exodus 18:13-27; Psalm 34; Romans 13:8-11; John 7:53-8:11 This gospel text is a real oddity. In many translations/versions there are brackets around the whole story! The New Revised Standard Version has double brackets; the Revised Standard has no brackets. The first thing you’ll read about it in any commentary is that it doesn’t appear at all in the most reliable and oldest of the manuscripts, and yet we know it existed from very early in Christian tradition

Waiting and Hoping August 8, 2021 2 Samuel 18; Psalm 130; Ephesians 4: 25-26, 29, 31-32 (The David saga continues) With the connivance of his cousin, Amnon (one of David’s sons) rapes Tamar, his half-sister which sets off another cycle of violence in David’s family. Lust leads to rape. Rape leads to despair in Tamar and self-loathing in Amnon while in Absalom, Tamar’s brother, it breeds violent revenge. Two years later, still hating his brother, Absalom invites Amnon to a gr

August 1, 2021 Ephesians 4:11-15; 2 Samuel 11—12:15 [Psalm 17] President Calvin Coolidge was known for being a man of few words. If the stories about him are true, that must have been his character even as a young person. Like the one where he came home from church and his mother asked him what the sermon had been about. “Sin,” he said. “Well, what did the preacher say about it?” his mother went on. “He was against it.” Calvin replied. We’ll never know what the preacher reall