Wil
Biblical scholar in Hebrew and Hebrew Bible: special interest in translation textual plurality, (Septuagint, Dead Seas Scrolls, Samaritan Pentateuch, Aleppo Codex, Leningrad Codex); feminist, womanist and post-colonial biblical interpretation; prophets and prophecy in the Ancient Near East and ancient Israel Episcopal priest, product of the Black Church, author, blogger, preacher, teacher, lecturer, public speakerEpiphany 2
In the first lesson, God reveals herself and makes her glory manifest through her redemptive love for her people, expressed here through a marriage metaphor. God will lead her people and her land and be their protector. It is a patriarchal construct, particularly when read with the original masculine grammar. However, just as we have...... Read More
Epiphany 1
The 12 day Christmas party is over. But there are yet more treasures in store. Epiphany is a season of revelation. God draws back the curtain on mystery and wonder granting us a glimpse of unfolding redemption. In these lessons, devastated, conquered, ravished Jerusalem is raised up by the tender hand of God, presented here...... Read More
Feast of Epiphany
The Feast of the Epiphany (and the season that follows) is a festival of light. As with Advent, the season that need not be cast in binary terms of light in opposition to dark. In my preaching (and social media posting), I have observed that the light does not hate the holy luminous darkness that...... Read More
Sunday 2 After Christmas
The world looks new after the dawning of Christmas Day. These lessons imagine and celebrate a new day when the world will be different. In the first lesson, there will be a great diverse and inclusive gathering. God will devote special attention to bringing back home those who have been driven away. And there will...... Read More
Holy Name of Jesus
It’s still Christmas! Mid-Christmas we have the most Christmasy of feasts, the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus on 1 January. Today’s readings feature a most beloved and most often misinterpreted text, “a young woman is (already) pregnant,” Isaiah 7:14. Our spiritual ancestors looked back to the Greek version of this text in which...... Read More
Sunday 1 After Christmas
More Christmas! We have a Christmas triduum! (And more to come after a short interlude.) For the First Sunday After Christmas, which falls on the day after Christmas this year, Year W focuses on the human estate, the flesh in which God was pleased to dwell, our very human flesh. In the first lesson we...... Read More
Christmas Day (and Eve)
A whole lot of Christmas going on! Three sets of readings for The Day (and non-liturgical eve). Christmas I: A prophet combines the theme of pregnant expectation with the hope of resurrection, irresistible to Christian readers who cannot help but to read backwards with the evangelists through the prism of the life, death and, resurrection...... Read More
Advent 4 Year W
In Advent we await the birth of a Savior, a Redeemer, who is but a babe. This week the Holy Child receives literary company in the little boy Samuel at his mother’s breast. These two women, Mary and Hannah, encounter God in extraordinary ways, unmediated by the men around them and as a result bear...... Read More
Advent 3 Year W
Another week in Advent, another annunciation. This time the woman is not named, her son will be, Samson the strong. Like Yocheved (Jochebed) the mother of Moses, she will be the mother of Israel’s deliver. Yet this woman named many times over by the rabbis is more than a womb pressed into service. She is...... Read More
Remember Jesus of the Line of Bathsheba
2 Timothy 2:8 Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, from the line of David [and Bathsheba]; that is my gospel… (Proper 28 Year W) In the name of God: The Author, the Word and the Translator. Amen. On October 28, I had the privilege of being seated and installed as the Right Rev. Sam B....... Read More