Thou little tiny child
When did “Christmas” arrive for you? Or did it? Was it last night during a candlelit “Silent Night” or when you first laid eyes on your grandchild this morning or . . . For me, “Christmas” arrived just after the evening service. After Silent Night, I walked outside into the parking lot to await any folks who wanted to stand with their candles and sing a few more carols. As a sort of “extend the joy” kind of thing. Well, it was cold and my coat was in the car. No gloves (
For the love of God
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace. – Jimi Hendrix, rock guitarist Throughout scripture, we are called over and over again to love. And indeed we do love. We love our families. We love our country. We love our comfort. We love holidays. We love our things. We love our success. But do we love God? Do we love God more than these things? When we truly learn to love God, we cannot help but love our neighbor too and the world shi
Many are called, few pick up
God will find a way to let us know that God is with us in this place, wherever we are, however far we think we’ve run. And maybe that’s one reason we worship — to respond to grace. We praise God not to celebrate our own faith but to give thanks for the faith God has in us. To let ourselves look at God, and let God look back at us. And to laugh, and sing, and be delighted because God has called us God’s own. – Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith Being
Within our longest night
The Earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament hanging in the blackness of space. As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. – James Irwin, American astronaut Early this morning, at 3:12 a.m. PST, we went through the winter solstice and our longest night of the year. The December solstice occurs when the sun reaches its most southerly declination of -23.5 degrees. In oth
Love made visible
Of God’s love we can say two things: it is poured out universally for everyone from the Pope to the loneliest wino on the planet; and secondly, God’s love doesn’t seek value, it creates value. It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value. Our value is a gift, not an achievement. – William Sloane Coffin in Credo A number of years ago I used to have office space at a church in San Francisco that had been built in the early
