new life
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Letter to Thomas, 27 April 2025
For several years, for the Sunday after Easter Day, I’ve written a letter to the disciple Thomas. Some of them I’ve made public. This is one of them. Dear Thomas: The theme song from Cheers has been coming to mind a lot recently. It begins, “Making your way in the world today / Takes everything Continue reading
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A Brand-New You
For the Christian, being baptized is not like beginning a new year or a new calendar. It’s not about turning over a new leaf in life. It’s about starting a new life entirely, a life in which everything old has passed away and everything becomes an entirely new creation (2 Cor. 5:17)! Here’s a baptismal Continue reading
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God and the comma
Some of the wisest advice I’ve heard came from comedienne Gracie Allen. Toward the end of her life, in her final love letter to her husband, George Burns, she wrote, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” After every mountaintop experience, there’s a comma and the hard return to the ordinary. And Continue reading
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Easter Day: Hidden in Plain Sight
The story is told among preachers, about one pastor and his daughter who were on their way to an Easter service when the young girl asked, “Dad, are you going to try to explain Easter again this year, or will you just let people enjoy it?” St. Paul tried to explain it (cf. 1 Cor. Continue reading
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The set of our sails
The young rich guy driving his new Ferrari Spider through Vermont pulled up at a traffic light, and an old Vermonter – dressed in Bean boots, corduroys, a threadbare flannel shirt, and big red suspenders – pulled up beside him on a Moped and started admiring his car. He allowed that the car must be Continue reading
a new thing, change, cooperate with change, degree of change, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, embrace change creatively, first things first, future, grace of God, how to live with change, living with change, new identity, new life, old Vermonter, pace of change, price of change, resisting change, St. Peter, Stephen Covey, the main thing, the set of the sails, the set of the soul, winds of change -
The other side of Good Friday
In popular tradition, the cross of Christ is a sign of rejection, shame, suffering, and death, which is the point St. Paul made when he wrote that Jesus “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8). You can’t get more humble, you can’t get lower, Continue reading
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Affirming our baptism
On this Pentecost Day in the congregation I serve, a young man formally and for the first time publicly affirmed the vows of Christian faith that were made for him at his baptism. It was also a day when all of those gathered affirmed their faith in the words of one of the historic confessions Continue reading
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Plotting resurrection
“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen” (Luke 24:5). On the first day of the week some women came to the cemetery to find the body of Jesus. They did what any of us would have done. They came looking for him where they had Continue reading
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Where’s everybody going?
“I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” So Karen Blixen begins Out of Africa, the account of her life in Kenya. At the beginning of the movie based on the book, Meryl Streep repeats that line wistfully, as if invoking a memory. “I had a farm in Africa . Continue reading
The Sauntering Pilgrim 