1 Kings 17: 17-24
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Resources from 2016 to 2019
Where Is God?
I’m in the middle of reading a very absorbing novel. It’s called “Life After Life” and it is by Kate Atkinson. It’s the life story of a woman born in 1910, or rather it is her life-stories, because the novel tells multiple different versions of her life. Each life is different, shaped by the choices she and those around her make. The first version is very short. Born during a snowstorm with the cord wrapped round her neck, she dies at birth because the doctor can’t get to her through the snow. So we start again. This time the doctor makes it through the snow, and she survives, only to meet another fate a few years later – I won’t give you any spoilers. The story restarts again and again – it sounds tedious, but it isn’t – and each time we travel down a different road with her.How Do I Know the Will of God?
In the best-selling book Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom tells about visiting his old Brandeis University teacher, Morrie Schwartz, who was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Mitch would fly in every Tuesday from Detroit (where he is a sports writer for the Free Press) to take his final class from Morrie, who, by that time, was thin, wizened, and unable to even feed himself.One day as Mitch was leaving, Morrie said, “Can I tell you the thing I’m learning most with this disease? The most important thing in life is to learn how to give love and to let it come in.” So, in answer to the question, “How do we hear the sound of God in silence?” we listen for the heartbeat of love.
A Morsel from Your Hand
As I lifted my eyes from the letter I was writing seated in the bookstore café, I searched for a thought while I watched a woman ride in the door on a Walmart motorized cart. My son, across from me, was lost in the pages of a fantasy novel. I looked back down, pen to the paper to finish my sentence, and when I looked up a moment later, she was next to our table, had come straight to us. She said, “hello,†then looked away, fighting the words and gearing up for rejection. Half through her explanation, feeling awkward and wanting to end her humiliation, I gently cut her off and said, “Do you need money?†Her answer was, “Yes, $26,†an amount so exact, so without explanation, and so more than what I was expecting and yet still modest, that I startled.
Resources from 2013 to 2015
Proper 5C (2013)
("Whether it is because you lived through it or because you've seen plenty of documentary footage of it, the odds are that most people here this morning pretty well know what the term 'Beatlemania' means. Throughout much of the 1960s this phenomenon swept over people wherever John, Paul, George, and Ringo went...")
Resources from the Archives
Blogging Toward Sunday
("James Alison says that with Jesus 'the whole mechanism by which death retains people in its thrall had been shown to be unnecessary. Whatever death is, it is not something which has to structure every human life from within 'but rather it is an empty shell, a bark without a bite...")Consider the Alternatives
("I remember a cartoon I saw once, showing a character bemoaning the problems of the world – poverty, war, disease, pollution and on and on – and asking rhetorically, 'But what can one person do?' The next frame showed a chorus of voices from a million points around the globe all asking the same question: 'What can one person do?'...")The Second Death
("Many years ago, I read a suggestion in Word and Witness to use the Graham Greene short story, The Second Death, as the sermon for the text from the gospel. The writer of this suggestion said that one approach would be to read the short story aloud. The preacher could then pause at the conclusion of the story, close the book, and then say, 'Friends, Jesus came to give new life...")The Eighth Day
("Both of my parents died last August. It fell to my husband, my brother and me to clear out their cottage. I came across a large photo of my father, who was a pastor for 60 years of his life. It was a candid shot, taken first thing in the morning on a parish retreat. He is sitting up in bed in his pajamas, against his pillows and half-covered by blankets...")