There Will Be Signs…
When I read about Jesus warning his disciples that there will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, distress among nations, and people fainting from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world,* I feel like I am reading the newspaper instead of words written two thousand years ago. Every […]
How to Love God
The words “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One” have been familiar to me for longer than I can remember. Of course, I tend to remember them better in the original Hebrew that I learned to chant as soon as I could talk, and Jesus seems to have learned a different […]
Names and Stories
When I lived in Israel in the early 1970s, I visited a lake in the northern part of the country that Israelis call Kinneret. It is called that, I was told, because its roughly triangular shape resembles a kinnor, a certain kind of hand-held harp mentioned many times in scripture. Some linguists say this is […]
A Stormy Season
Recently, I heard a group of liturgical scholars refer to these long months of pandemic as “Covidtide,” almost as if it were an official season of the church year. Unlike the joyful twelve-day period of Christmastide, which leads to the celebration of the unveiling Christ’s glory at Epiphany, the season of Covidtide has been marked […]
