To be clear, the Second Coming of Christ, as it is described in the scriptures and depicted in hymnody and bronze and oils, will be impossible to miss. I am not one to second-guess the reality behind the prediction of this terminal spectacle: Christ the Lord, robed in dreadful majesty, descending from the clouds, accompanied by countless hosts of saints and angels. You may think me odd, but I pray for this to happen in my lifetime. I hope I am around to see it.   My hope has

Every once in awhile I meet someone who says he is Jesus. I try to balance my skepticism of their claim with the gospel and baptismal injunction to seek and serve Jesus in troubled people such as these. And who knows: in that moment, that person could well be the Christ.   The other day, I met someone who said he was a royal. I was in my priestly garb, walking near Sixth and Mission, when a man stopped me. When I said I was an Episcopalian, he recalled that we are an offshoot

When I was a hospice chaplain I often worked with couples. Some were facing the end of a long, happy marriage as one spouse was soon to die. Among my charges were devout Christians who knew their Bible. They wondered about today’s gospel passage, in which Jesus says there is no marriage in heaven. “Does this mean our marriage will be over?” they said. “Will we even recognize each other? I’m already starting to miss him, to miss her!”   These questions, and the anxiety, grief,

“To be a saint means to be myself,” wrote the twentieth-century monk Thomas Merton. He didn’t always think so. Years before, while wondering what to do with his life, a fellow monk astonished this doubting-Thomas by saying that if he really wanted a vocation, he should aspire to sainthood.   It’s not such an astonishing idea, sainthood. Some eighteen centuries before Merton, Saint Irenaeus of Lyon wrote that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.” And before Irenaeus

In “The Thin Man” movies from the 1930s and 1940s, Nick Charles is a reluctant private detective who takes on cases in his retirement from the police department. His wife Nora comes from money, and their lifestyle shows it. Often they will cross paths with the ex-cons and ne’er-do-wells Nick had put away years ago, and Nora will say, with a subtle side-eye and smirk, “Oh, Nicky – you have the most interesting friends!”   Kate will repeat this line to me sometimes after we cro

“And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”  (Lk. 18:8).   Well … will he or won’t he? And what is faith, anyway?   Faith is the expression of a system of belief. The Nicene Creed we’ll soon recite is an affirmation of faith in the core tenets of Christianity. The catechism in the back of the prayer book that explains these tenets is properly known as “An Outline of the Faith.” And perhaps you’ve been asked, “What faith are you?” – which is to say “what

Two Sundays ago, a few miles down the road from the last congregation in Michigan that I served, a man who hated Mormons – he had called them the Antichrist – rammed his vehicle into one of their churches, setting the building ablaze, and burning it to the ground. He killed four people in the attack – two by gunshot and two by the fire – and injured eight others. He was killed on the scene by the police.   A Mormon from another church began a Go-Fund-Me campaign that quickly

What if Franciscans ran the world?   It’s a trick question! – Franciscans have no desire to run the world. The Trappist monk Thomas...

Did an angel whisper in your ear And hold you close and take away your fear In those long last moments?   (L. Williams 1998)   “The word...

Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that...

The feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross has its origin in the fourth century, when the Emperor Constantine’s mother Helena oversaw...

I will admit right up front that the word slavery as a metaphor in modern usage is problematic. Our nation’s history of the horrors of...

The day Father Chuck turned fifty, he bought supper for everybody at the street mission. Father Chuck was a regular Monday night...

On the first leg of my flight home, the police were summoned to nab a passenger. The man wasn’t dangerous or violent, but he was...

Impatient. Divisive. Contemptuous.   Three words seldom used to describe Jesus, but here he is and there they are, all in one gospel...

In her recent obituary, The New York Times  wrote of the actress Loni Anderson that she typified the American beauty standards of her day...

“ Our days are full of pain, our work is a vexation, and even at night our minds do not rest.” When the wise and wealthy king over Israel...

What’s in it for God?   The Church has always held that God doesn’t need us; God doesn’t need anything. God is God.   We are made in...

Way back in seminary I learned that if I stopped and prayed before studying or writing, I was more focused and less frustrated. The same...

Altruists claim that humans can act selflessly to help others, expecting no benefit or reward.   Rubbish! say the psychological egoists....