Over the years, I have tried to follow the injunction, attributed to Karl Barth but probably apocryphal, to preach with “the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” Not being a Christian, I have never taken the injunction literally. Rather I have understood it to mean, root yourself in your tradition, ground yourself in the goodness of the Earth, and from that foundation offer up what...
On October 6, 2020, I was part of a panel discussion organized by Move to Amend on The Immorality of the Climate Crisis and Corporate Rule. The moderator was Greg Coleridge other panel participants were Shannon Biggs (Movement Rights), Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap (Move to Amend), and Casey Camp Horinek (Ponca Nation of Oklahoma). Here are my remarks:
And as we traverse the water of time, whether the waters be smooth or rocky, we must each answer the questions: What is worth saving? What must be let go?
Like a deer crying for water,
my soul cries for You, O God;
my soul thirsts for God, the living God;
O when will I come to appear before God!
My tears have been my food day and night;
I am ever taunted with, “Where is your God?”
Today, I want to talk with you about a difficult subject: death. Today, I want to talk with you about a glorious subject: life. In short, I want to talk with you about religion. The Unitarian Universalist theologian Forrest Church claimed, “religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.” These days of pandemic make death an almost unavoidable subject. Which...
This week, I must confess, I have been feeling more than a little tearful. It has been 154 days since I last preached a sermon to you in person. And I have been missing you. And I have been missing my life from the before times. And my family--other than my son this has been the longest I have gone without seeing any of them. And I have found myself struggling to live in the here and now.
This past Friday the Washington Post journalist Robert Samuels put out a simple eleven-word tweet. Over an image of the Post, he wrote, “Have mercy. Every story in this front page made m[e] gasp.” The articles offered a litany of woes: “Trump suggests delaying election;” “U.S. economy contracts at record rate;” “Mail backlog raises fears of delays in ballot delivery;” “DHS gathers ‘intelligence’...