Would Nicodemus follow Jesus on social media? Some of Nicodemus’s peers would, if only to troll Jesus and respond to his posts with angry emojis, the way some people today follow public figures, not out of admiration, but to see what madness they are up to and to make cutting comments.   I think Nicodemus would follow Jesus, but as a lurker, someone who looks at Jesus’s feed but doesn’t engage with it. He wouldn’t give a thumbs-up for fear of being ridiculed or un-friended by

I’m friends with a bartender in Flint, Michigan. She tells the story when once she delivered a round of drinks to a table and one of the men grabbed her backside. She wheeled around and walloped him. “What?” he shrugged. “I didn’t know you couldn’t do that. You should put up a sign or something!” – Thus beginneth today’s sermon on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.   Theologically-speaking, Paul is correct. Sin is not reckoned when there is no law. But, as the bar owner late

Simone Weil, the twentieth-century Christ-curious yet devoutly-unbaptized French philosopher, wrote that sin is not making ourselves distant from God, but rather that sin is looking in the wrong direction from where God would have us look. The Litany of Penitence that we will recite in a few minutes, and revisit come Good Friday, reminds us of the many things that keep our eyes from watching God. This litany is an eye chart, an “I” exam in the obverse. Reading where we have g

† “Precious Lord, take my hand, Lead me on, let me stand, I am tired, I am weak, I am worn; Through the storm, through the night, Lead me on to the light, Take my hand, precious Lord, Lead me on.”   Thomas Dorsey – not the big-band leader, but the son of a Black revivalist preacher – Thomas Dorsey composed these verses and this music during the Great Depression, in his great depression, after his wife and infant son died.   Dorsey wanted to give up on God and give up on his v

Absalom Jones’s righteousness exceeded that of the scribes and Pharisees. In Jesus’s time, the scribes and Pharisees were the men who upheld the norms and traditions of Jewish life, law, and worship. In Absalom Jones’s time, the scribes and Pharisees were, if you will, the men who upheld the norms and traditions of white, property-owners’ life, law, and worship.   Born in 1746 and raised enslaved, Absalom Jones knew that chattel-slavery – regarding certain human beings as les

What is the state of the Saints? Is there a word or a phrase that comes to your mind about the health and welfare of All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco – the people who form it and the work that we do?   Today’s second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that Jesus was like us: flesh and blood; himself tested, to help us when we are tested. This is usually what comes to mind: he suffers in our sufferings, he consoles us in our desolations, he is the ato

The human eye has not evolved to see confidently in darkness. Unlike others of God’s creatures, we are not a nocturnal species. Absent the light, our steps are unsteady, the grope of our hands tentative and erratic. In the familiarity of our own home, we worry about a stubbed toe. In stranger settings, we fear greater dangers. There is little wonder, then, that biblical literature uses darkness as a metaphor for things gone wrong, for being listless and lost. And light, in co

When has the wine given out for you? When has your life been nothing but dregs and sediment? The faintest whiff of what was, left behind on a dried-up cork?   Was it when the wine of your faith gave out? Or the wine of your career? Or the wine of your health? Or of a relationship? Or of your identity? How about the wine of your hopes, or happiness, or desires? When has the wine given out for you?   Many would say that the wine of good government in our nation has given out. D

What did Jesus know, and when did he know it? A similar question was asked in 1973 of the incumbent United States President by a senator of his own party – ah, those were simpler times. Thirty years later, recalling this phrasing, I asked my question during a seminary theology class. What did Jesus know, and when did he know it?  How does the divine omniscience of the Second Person of the Trinity square with the full humanity of Jesus of Nazareth? Surely Jesus had to be toile

What do you hope for, wish for, deeply desire from this new year? The turn of the calendar page and the annual plus-one of that descriptive digit brings with it the notion of a fresh start, a beginning-again.   For Isaiah’s people – Third Isaiah as Old Testament scholars call him – the desired fresh start and hoped-for new beginning was pinned on the return home of the exiled Hebrew people from captivity in far-off Babylon. Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory

Your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety. Jesus was found by his anxious and perplexed parents in temple in Jerusalem, three days after the Passover. Saint Luke tips his hand with this important bit of story-telling in today’s gospel. Some years later, Jesus would return to the temple, and be offered as the  Passover Lamb, sacrificed for us on crucifixion’s altar, only to rise on the third day and to present himself to his anxious and perplexed disciples

It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known (John 1:18). How does one make known the unknowable? We use metaphor, simile, and symbol. This is like that, stands for that, is close to describing that. The better artists and writers help us in this way to make concrete that which is abstract, tangible that which is incorporeal, permanent that which is ephemeral.   God is the best, the superlative artist and writer, the creator who used the

I eavesdrop. I spend much of my time in public spaces, so I really can’t help but overhear and listen in on conversations.   “What are you doing for Christmas?” people say lately. I hear a long list of responses: leaving the city to see family, and anticipating travel headaches; staying home to be with family, and anticipating hosting headaches; going out to dinner; cooking dinner at home; waiting tables; tending bar; doing as little as possible; doing absolutely nothing; Man

Most every week, in my priest’s kit, I take a long walk at night. I travel through the Upper and Lower Haight, the Tenderloin, South of Market; and occasionally I wander into Union Square, Chinatown, and North Beach. It gets dark early in these last days, which makes places with the lights on really stand out. I see into well-appointed homes, decorated for Christmas. Pubs and restaurants filled with festive-sweatered holiday revelers mixing with the regulars. Shops hopeful fo

Shame and fear are powerful emotions. Have you ever felt them? Me, too.   The big dictionary in my study defines shame as a “painful emotion caused by a strong sense of guilt, embarrassment, unworthiness, or disgrace.” Fear is defined as a “feeling of agitation and anxiety caused by the presence or imminence of danger” [Am. Her., 4 th  Ed].   Shame and fear are powerful motivators. Shame can make us deny and deflect, but it also can make us apologize and change. Fear can make

“Be patient, beloved. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.”   † Quoting Isaiah elsewhere in the gospels, Jesus promised release to captives, in addition to good news for the poor and relief from a litany of ailments. Today, Jesus added raising the dead to his performance self-review. But did you notice that Jesus didn’t offer his cousin John that get-out-of-jail-free card. I wonder what John thought about that bit of not-so-good news brought back by his

There is a joyful sort of universalism in today’s readings; a sign of how much God loves us. Jesse’s root – the coming Christ – will be the signal to peoples of the nations who seek him. The fulfillment of the first coming of Christ will bring the Gentiles into the fold. And even the stones in the riverbed of the Jordan will be born as beloved children, if God desires it. This was gospel then; this is good news now.   But there’s a catch, or an opportunity, if you prefer. Rep

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,