All Saints Day (Year A, RCL)

If you happen to read the Message translation of Matthew’s beatitudes, you’ll notice that instead of saying “blessed” the word is “happy.”

Not all endings are bad.

Elaine Pagels's book repeats a winning formula: contrast the canon's controversial parts with more appealing Gnostic selections.

Late in life, my mother confessed that she never enjoyed cooking. "But," she said, "I did take satisfaction in serving simple meals to my family." Well, there's no such thing as a simple meal anymore.

Each week my church includes a prayer for the families of American soldiers who have died. As the names are read, I try to hold them in prayer. But I have wrestled with these prayers.

It is not enough for the prophet to declare God’s consolation—it is framed in visions of loud singing and dancing.

Although the images of shepherd and sheep wind their way through these lectionary texts, they are difficult images for the contemporary church to embrace. I recall many of the adults in one congregation cringing during a children’s time a few years ago, when a well-intentioned volunteer tried to teach the children a song that had them “baa-ing” for Jesus. What are we teaching our children, some of us wondered: To follow the crowd without question? To have no mind of one’s own? To expect someone else to take care of us?

I was in Cuba this summer on a mission trip, when our host pastor, Héctor Méndez, approached me, his face grave and drawn. “They have attacked a Presbyterian hospital and school in Pakistan,” he said, “and people have been killed.”

The Beatitudes sneak up on us.

Would going to church make any difference in how you live—or die?