What Will the United States Look Like?

Could it actually happen? Is it possible that the Republican Party will participate in the destruction of the rule of law and ignore the plain fact that a President who lost his re-election bid by seven million votes and a decisive margin in the Electoral College is, two years after the fact, still engaged in […]

Maybe We Need a Monarch

Maybe we need a monarch, a Constitutional Monarch, with no political authority or power but who reflects the nation’s highest ideals and values and reminds the people of their better selves, I.e., a monarch like Great Britain’s. That thought kept occurring to me as I sat in front of the television watching Queen Elizabeth’s funeral […]

Find Our Voices

Something fundamental about our nation changed last week. In a period of three days the United States changed from a nation and its government that are primarily concerned to protect all its citizens to a nation that prioritizes the opportunity of some of its citizens to walk around, openly in public, carrying lethal weapons. Exactly […]

Gratitude and Thanksgiving

     “Praise the Lord! How good it is to sing praises to our God…Sing to the Lord with Thanksgiving!” I have never counted the times the Bible admonishes us to be grateful, to thank and praise God, but it’s a lot. Thanksgiving and praise are a major motif in the Psalter, ancient Israel’s hymn book. And […]

A Sermon for Labor Day My favorite teacher – one of my favorite human beings – was the late Joseph Sittler, Lutheran pastor, first class scholar and, for years Professor of Theology at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. In the world of religious scholarship in the last decades of the 20th Century, Sittler […]

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Beauty of the Ordinary

Every experience feels new, right and good and calls out in me a gratitude for the grace and beauty of the ordinary. For more than a year we put life on hold. It was March 2020 when our adult children went into full protection mode, doing everything in their power to keep us safe. They […]

An Easter Sermon

April 4, 2021 When you are faced with the challenge of expressing a truth for which you simply do not have words big enough – the preacher’s dilemma every Sunday, particularly this one – it helps if you have a fallback position – a great poem or good music. I’ll spare you my singing, but here are some lines […]

Wilderness

I remember it well. One day in late February or early March, classmates showed up at Fairview Elementary School with what looked for all the world like a smudge of dirt on their foreheads. I was mystified – and fascinated. There was a large Roman Catholic population in our industrial, railroad town. I didn’t put […]

THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE

He pretty much defamed everything I love about my country: The affirmation of the dignity and value of every human being, created with unalienable rights; the open-armed compassion of “Give me your tired, your poor” emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor; the aspiration and slow but steady drive to assure equality […]

What the world needs now…

I recently read Walter Brueggemann’s new book, Virus as a Summons to Faith, and it was exactly what I needed. It is such a strange, unprecedented time. We are locked down here, as I suspect most of us are in some way or another. We can’t entertain or visit with friends in our apartments. Meetings and […]