Week of January 13, 2019
Many of you have asked: during this time of transition, this liminal period in the church, what can I do to help? There are always opportunities to volunteer for various outreach ministries, worship assistants, and children’s ministry helpers, but right now we have a particular need in certain areas of ministry. We need office volunteers…
Week of January 6, 2019
There’s a term for a period of time like this: liminal. It means to be barely perceptible, or just bridging a threshold. You might be more familiar with a more complex form of the word, “subliminal,” which means just below a noticeable threshold. Trinity is right now in a transition, about which only God is…
Week of December 23, 2018
If you are one of the lucky few who have seen pictures of Sheryl Poole’s Christmas Village, aka “Poolesville,” you should be particularly amazed that she could get any Christmas decorating done at all given all the work that happens as the church approaches the holiday, including two bulletins for Sunday, another two for Christmas…
Week of December 16, 2018
In last Sunday’s sermon I mentioned how we may know a neighbor both figuratively and literally in our lives. The reference was to those of us who currently do some kind of ministry for someone in our community. But I said that we often have more than one neighbor in our lives. Recently, I was…
Week of December 9, 2018
Many, many years ago I was on staff at a camp program being run by another denomination (that will go nameless). They sought to do work projects on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where I had previously lived and worked while in the employment of the Episcopal Diocese of South Dakota. My job was to…
Week of December 2, 2018
“Love your neighbor(hood)” is the theme I am introducing this Advent at Trinity Church. It is a term I picked up from the Rev. Cathleen Bascom, bishop-elect of the Diocese of Kansas. For me, it is a reminder that one of the two greatest commandments identified by Jesus has a local context. As we begin…
Week of November 25, 2018
I mentioned at last Sunday’s Adult Forum that thankfulness is at the core of Episcopalian spirituality and discipleship. We do not take Jesus’ teachings to heart out of fear of punishment or a desire to please an impossibly strict God, but because we recognize what God has already done for us. God’s actions are not…
Week of November 18, 2018
Many of you heard the second part of my two-part sermon on the book of Ruth, but for those who missed it I had hoped to make the sermon available on the podcast. Unfortunately the digital recorder we use to record the sermons is missing, so I was unable to record it last Sunday. So…
Week of November 11, 2018
At our last Adult Forum, I asked the participants to rate the strength of the various ministry relationships that Trinity has into three categories: strong, could be better, or needs help. I intentionally didn’t limit the scope of their answers; they could be institutions, groups, etc. Their answers obviously reflected their own perspective, and not everyone agreed…
Week of November 4, 2018
Last Sunday we celebrated (early) the Feast of All Saints, which is actually on Thursday, November 1. At the 8 a.m. service, I mentioned how optimistic it is to celebrate the lives of the saints, a concept that had come from a long conversation I had with some friends about whether we thought the world…