[RCL] Isaiah 9:1-4; Psalm 27:1, 5-13; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23 There’s a story about a farmer from a rural part of the country. And this farmer comes to visit a relative in a major city. They’re walking down the busy and noisy main street, amidst the clamor and confusion and traffic and general hubbub…

[RCL]: Isaiah 9:1-4; Psalm 27:1, 5-13; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23 There’s a story about a farmer from a rural part of the country. And this farmer comes to visit a relative in a major city. They’re walking down the busy and noisy main street, amidst the clamor and confusion and traffic and general hubbub…

Today is January 22nd and we are just about three weeks into 2017. Did you make any resolutions this year? If you did, how are they holding up? New Year’s resolutions can be big or small. Do any of these sound familiar? Making a New Year’s resolution is a kind of repentance. We make New Year’s…

Sometimes landlubbers venture onto water in a boat with a “do-everything” professional guide. Country folk might view this as people “calling themselves ‘fishing.’” This kind of fishing includes little, if any, challenge. It is possible for a guide not only to provide the boat, rods and reels; but also to furnish bait and hooks, set…

Proclaiming the Good News is not something left only to individual evangelists; it is in fact the task of the entire church. Yet, we are often led to believe and act as though only individuals can tell the story of Jesus. Epiphany is a season about proclamation and the power of God at work in…

The Bible is full of beginnings; not only the universal one, when God speaks into existence the components of a magnificent cosmos, but other beginnings as well. Thus the human race begins with Adam and Eve, and begins again after the flood with Noah and his family. In old age, Abraham answers the invitation of…

In the Gospel for today, Jesus is identified by Matthew as the prophetic Light that shines in the darkness. He is associated with Isaiah’s prophecy that people who have lived in a land of deep darkness now have a new light shining upon them. Unfortunately one need not look very far to see the darkness…

I was born at the last possible moment before the Postwar Baby Boom, and grew up with the Korean War, the Cold War, the A- Bomb, the H-Bomb, Civil Defense Bomb Shelters, classroom drills in how to curl up under our desks to avoid the bomb, and a host of other frightening signs of impending…