In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen. This August, Tracey and I will have been married for twenty-eight years. And, by my count, we have moved ten times now since we got married.  Whenever we move, we always chip or break several...

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen. Today’s Gospel comes from the so-called “high priestly prayer” of Jesus.  Every year, we read part of it on the Sunday after Ascension Day.  And we do that to remind ourselves that Jesus is...

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen. Last week, we heard from the fifteenth chapter of John, where Jesus says “I am the vine; you are the branches.”  And, whenever I preach about that lesson, I stress the importance of staying...

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen. Jesus said, “I am the vine; you are the branches.”  Some of us may hear these words and worry we need to be pruned.  A few of us may even worry we’ll get thrown away and burned. We all need...

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen. There is a beautiful, beautiful line from the Exsultet, the ancient hymn that we sing toward the beginning of the Easter Vigil, and it always strikes me:  “How wonderful,” we sing, “and beyond...

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen. “Touch me and see.”   Jesus spoke these words to the disciples on the evening of the very first Easter.  “Touch me,” he said, “and see.” This, more or less, is Luke’s version of the Gospel we...

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen. About thirty years ago, a man named Greg Brown recorded what I can only describe as a Gospel song for an unbelieving age.  In it, he manages to be haunted by the figure of Jesus and the...

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen. Some of us, no doubt, remember 1968.  The Vietnam War had deeply divided our country.  Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated.  There were riots in the streets.  King was...

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. There is a house my dad helped build in Council Grove, Kansas. I have seen it with my own eyes. My dad helped build it when he was just a teenager, and the hardest part was probably working with...

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. One summer, when I was about fourteen years old, I rented a boat and went out sailing. It was nothing new for me. I’d done it hundreds of times before. In fact, I owned a boat at the time, and it...

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. “Where there is no love, put love in—and you will draw love out.” In this way, St. John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Carmelite brother and spiritual teacher, counsels us to pray—and to...

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Babies change us. I’ll never forget when ours were born. I wept with joy. I felt so inadequate and so afraid. With Rachel, because she was our first. With Danny, because he was whisked off to...

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Jesus’ love is bubbling over. Jesus’ love is bubbling over. Jesus’ love is bubbling over. Al—le—lu—ia. Today, for Trinity Sunday, I’m starting with a song our children used to sing in Sunday...