Today is Remembrance Sunday – the Sunday closest to November eleventh – the day World War I ended nearly a hundred years ago at the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918. In the United Kingdom and in many Commonwealth countries, Remembrance Sunday is kept with great solemnity as an…

Jesus was good at providing difficult stories. No doubt they were as hard to hear standing in a group in Palestine as they are from our pews today. If we have sympathy for anyone in today’s gospel reading, it is probably for the poor person who was deprived of the gift once given, just because…

Among the biggest mysteries of daily life is the passage of time. What happens to it? Why are we so bound by it? Why does time pass so slowly when we are young and so rapidly when we are old? It seems that the opposite should be true. And above all—when loved ones leave us,…

[A special note to the reader or preacher: this sermon is built around a poem or kind of “rap” lyric that is designed for antiphonal call and response. The reader reads a line and the congregation repeats that line. Of course, the lyric can simply be read as a poem. But if it is done…

On this, the next-to-the-last Sunday of the church year, we hear one resounding theme in all our readings: “Stay awake. Be alert. Be found working with what you have been given.” For Christians in the early church, this was a message of absolute urgency, especially because much of the ancient church, as we hear implied…

This parable as reported by Matthew has some powerful images that have influenced our thinking and our language profoundly. The word talanto (singular) and talanta (plural) in the koine Greek (the Greek of the New Testament writers), represented, according to scholars, fifteen years’ wages of one person’s labor. Somewhere else it says that it was worth $1,000. So, for his time,…

“Now concerning the times and the seasons, brother and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you. For you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night….So then, let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be…