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Restoration to Unity: Personal reflections in Advent

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                                      I was in the restroom at the evangelical church my brother Stephen attended near Portland. It was the day of Stephen’s funeral. Stephen had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 49, leaving a shocked and grieving spouse and six grieving sons. I immediately recognized the man who walked in as I was at the sink. He was a friend of our family who had been a member of a church my father had pastored some thirty years previous. Apparently he recognized me as well, for as he stood at the urinal doing his business his rich baritone voice boomed out: “So Jonathan, I hear you’re hanging out with those liberal Episcopalians!” I left the restroom and went back to my family. I recall this event as a manifestation of the kind of us-versus-them binary so encouraged and promoted in the church culture of my youth  In my youth I was told o...
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Easter Morning 2012

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                                                                                  Greetings to all of you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Conqueror of Death and bringer of Life. Welcome! I call your attention to the way our Easter Gospel ends. I'm going to give you a rather literal rendering of it in the original, and it sounds like this: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them. To no one anything they said; afraid they were for…” Strange, isn’t it? Scholarly consensus is that this is the way the original author of Mark’s Gospel ended the Gospel According to Mark. Later scribes will add the material which tries to give a more pleasing end to the story the Gospel is telling. Tom Long tells a true story about a guy...
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Of dung and salt and being a catalyst for the kingdom

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Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany February 6 2011 St. Paul's, Bellingham “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown and out trampled underfoot.” I've often wondered about one aspect of this passage. How does salt become not salty? I suspect it is when it becomes wet and the saltiness leaches out. I read about another possibility recently. For some years scholars have been studying the Bible in its cultural environment. What they publish is of interest to people like me. It is of interest today, because it is a possible answer to my question. Scholars Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh in their “Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels” call attention to an obscure passage from the Book of Job which reads: “As for the earth, out of it comes bread....”Job 28:5a What does this mean? If you've been to a pizza place recently – the kind that offe...
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