Thank you to all who made our Easter celebration such a joyous event! Did you know that in the Church calendar Easter is not a day, not a week, but a week of weeks? Yep, the Easter season lasts seven weeks. We think of Lent as a time of spiritual renewal. And it is. But what about this week of weeks? How can you help make this also a time of spiritual renewal for yourself? Some ideas: First, worship. Every Sunday is a little Easter. Last Sunday our worship centered around Sta

Sue and I were riding in a golf cart at the Dunes of Maui Lani golf course. As we approached the tee box at the 6th hole we saw this bird, a Hawaiian goose, a Nene. At first we thought it was just standing on one leg as some birds occasionally do, but then it hopped across the grass to start eating again and we realized it had only one leg. How sad, we thought. It must be injured. We called the Pro Shop and told them about the bird. The young man there laughed and said

Everybody got that? Beginning this Sunday, worship starts at 9:30. But how to get ready for Easter Sunday? In some ways, this is a hard day on which to preach. The day is too large. The story is beyond explanation. We can only respond with awe, wonder, amazement – and probably doubt, as well, for that is how the disciples reacted to what the women told them. And at the end of Matthew’s Gospel in the story of the great commission when Jesus commands his disciples to go and bap

This morning I opened my email feed and found a page from Diana Butler Bass, a blogger whose meditations I’ve come to admire more and more. Today she wrote about “hospitality”, a value held dear by every religious tradition. The humanities course I’ve been teaching for a few years now has a “comparative religion” component, and I nodded to recognize the truth of what she was saying. It seems that every religious tradition has its origin in a conflict of some kind: Lutherans a