Mary Magdalene came to the tomb alone, knowing that she was likely to be alone once she got there. No one publicly grieves a failed messiah. Except perhaps, for a woman who is called a sinner in public and a whore in private and sometimes the other way around. Mary saw that the tomb was...... Read More

I will use this single post and update it daily.  Monday: Aftermath Wasn’t that something? Everyone was there. Well, everyone who was anyone. We were all there. We who follow Jesus. There were a whole lot of folk around us looking at us like we had lost our minds. But some of them joined in...... Read More

Walking the Way: What is this strange thing that we do, walking around our churches and neighborhoods, waving palms from trees that are not native to where we are waiving them (for most of us), accompanied by choirs, the rare few with young acolytes on the backs of donkeys? Is it a living gospel? Is...... Read More

The world is a hostile place. The garden stories in Genesis give voice to an ancestral memory that it was not always thus.  These stories also articulate the Iron Age theology the permeates much of the scriptures, that the difficulties humanity faces must be their own fault. Yet the world is also a glorious creation...... Read More

Umm, did you mean to/why did you use an Easter reading for Lent?! I received this text and call more than once. This week’s readings invite us to reflect on the whole of our human story from the dust of our creation to the hope of our redemption, to carry that story with us as...... Read More

Psalm 51 symbolizes this season of repentance and reflection and at the same time its use as a liturgy of confession illustrates the need for A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church. The Church has long prayed this psalm without its first verse, the verse that frames the psalm as a confession for the sexual...... Read More

The story of Jesus manifesting his divinity at the wedding in Cana is paired with nontraditional readings this week. They are a celebration of love and marriage and by inference, a celebration of human sexuality. These readings begin with the lusciousness of the Song of Songs. The psalm is a royal wedding psalm for a...... Read More

The Feast of the Presentation is a reminder of the Jewishness of Jesus and, the Jewishness of his mother Mary and her husband Joseph. It is important for Christians to take seriously that they are Jews raising their child as a Jew. This is especially important as the feast comes on the heels of Holocaust...... Read More

The proclamation that God is in the midst of Daughter Zion invites a double hearing: God is present with her people and for Christians reading with and through the New Testament, that one daughter of Zion could say that God was incarnate in her, in the midst of the flesh and blood of her body....... Read More

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