On this third week of Advent, I was invited to light the candle of Joy in church and to speak about the joys which God is bringing me in the world. As I sat down to reflect on this, I immediately began to wonder why […]
Meditations
16 posts
A sermon on Genesis 1:1-5, preached at Park Avenue Christian Church, New York, NY, on November 27, 2022 (Advent I). Watch it on YouTube here. When beginning he, God, created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was shapeless and formless and bleakness covered […]
This past Lent, I set upon a project of creating an eight-panel version of the Stations of the Cross. My own version, which I dubbed the “Bioethics Stations of the Cross,” sought to hold biblical vignettes from the day of Jesus’ crucifixion in dialogue with […]
Early in the morning on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb. She saw that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance, so she ran off to Simon Peter and the […]
A sermon preached at the Sunday worship service at Church in the Highlands in White Plains, NY, on November 14, 2021. Scripture readings: Daniel 12: 1-3 Mark 13: 1-8 I wonder if any among you, if asked to name your favorite Bible verse, would point […]
This sermon was originally delivered for the online Sunday worship service at Park Avenue Christian Church, New York, NY, on July 4, 2021. View the recording here. In the dark of the evening they set out on the lake, assured in the navigational skills […]
This reflection was originally written for and shared at Park Avenue Christian Church in New York, NY, for the online Sunday service on August 23, 2020. Our theme for the month of August is Joy. There’s a funny paradox about joy: as wonderful and desirable […]
This sermon was originally delivered at the online Sunday service of Scarsdale Congregational Church in Scarsdale, NY, on August 9, 2020. We are capable of more than we imagine. I witnessed this truth in action over and over when I used to work as a […]
The prayer that Jesus instructs his followers to pray is a communal prayer, asking not for God to fill my needs, but for the needs of all in the community to be filled. Not just for God to forgive my sins, but for an economy of mercy to prevail in all our dealings with one another. In short, it is a prayer that requires something those who pray it.
…a lot of us walk around with the first two bars of a symphony in our heads, imagining that someday, when we have a better idea of what comes next, we’ll start to play. Some of the most transformative moments in my life happened when a person or incident gave me the strength or abandonment to haul off and play to the end of that second bar and see what came next.