Isaiah

Aristotle writes that we would never go to the theater to see terrible things happen to a good man through no fault of his. Yet here we gather, aching for a good man’s sorrows and turning to him to make sense of our own.

I eschew the danger of the river, but I know that it is where God leads me.

Last week we drove 350 miles to Smith College, where our daughter was singing with the glee club at Christmas Vespers. Each year at a pair of services, campus and community enter liminal space by hearing sacred music from student choral and orchestral groups, pondering poetry and biblical readings by students and faculty, and singing carols together. 

This year it also became a setting to turn attention to other matters. As a Facebook event page put it, “You can’t sing carols if you can’t breathe.”

Last week we drove 350 miles to Smith College, where our daughter was singing with the glee club at Christmas Vespers. Each year at a pair of services, campus and community enter liminal space by hearing sacred music from student choral and orchestral groups, pondering poetry and biblical readings by students and faculty, and singing carols together. 

This year it also became a setting to turn attention to other matters. As a Facebook event page put it, “You can’t sing carols if you can’t breathe.”

No one likes the thought of an angry God. It's hard enough to deal with an angry person.

"Remember the sabbath" is a costly commandment. Our culture’s assault on it extends far beyond Sunday.

My mother died on the winter solstice shortly after her 50th birthday. So I have spent a lot of time thinking about darkness and the return of the light.

As I read Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark, I wondered if I had fallen prey to the dualistic paradigm she finds so troubling.

It often feels like a rhetorical game, this question of what belongs to God.

The story of the golden calf is a parody of Israelite idolatry.

The story of the golden calf is a parody of Israelite idolatry.

Jesus' parable of the so-called "wicked tenant farmers" is a textbook illustration—a parody, even—of the economic and political dynamics of empire.

People are rightly disgusted by buildings with separate entrances for low-income residents. But churches have side-door people, too.

J. Denny Weaver is steadfast in his conviction that any conception of God found in the Bible must first be compared to the person of Christ himself.

Years ago, at a denominational gathering, I heard a visitor from the global South say the following about North American Christians:

They have so many things. They don’t need anything. Yet it seemed like the people were very thirsty, like they were in a desert and we were bringing them drops of water.

These words refuse to leave me.

Years ago, at a denominational gathering, I heard a visitor from the global South say the following about North American Christians:

They have so many things. They don’t need anything. Yet it seemed like the people were very thirsty, like they were in a desert and we were bringing them drops of water.

These words refuse to leave me.

A particular verse of scripture has been haunting me lately. I hear it as an indictment of an aspect of my personal life.

First, it was a lectionary text in Epiphany. Then I found it in the unifying passage of a devotional book I read.

“Bring the homeless poor into your house,” we read in Isaiah 58:7, part of a passage on genuine fasting.

Does the divine expression, the word, really work? Does it make a difference in our lives and in the world?

My yearning for the difference-making word drew me to James Crockett’s work in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago.

Most of us do not take criticism well. We get defensive, make excuses, or blame others. Nor do we engage in much self reflection or acknowledgement of our personal failings.

A lot of churches have deleted the prayer of confession from their Sunday morning orders of worship because of complaints that “those prayers are too depressing,” or “those things don’t apply to me.”

It’s not quite Lent, but we can see it from here.

What do these words from Isaiah ben Amoz mean for us?

My first instinct is to meditate on Isaiah 9 in light of its historical situation, which is bound up with the geopolitics of the late 8^th century BCE.