First Sunday after Christmas (Year B, RCL)

Growing in prayer is not simply acquiring a set of special spiritual skills. It is growing into Christian humanity.

Dhini didn’t ask to be adopted. That's the way grace works.

Snow can be tiresome, even deadly, but it can also be a sign of holiness and of hope.

After 48 years as a minister of word and sacrament, I will retire at the end of January.

Metaphor is essential to grasping the divine/human character of God. Nowhere is metaphor used more compellingly than by the apostle Paul, especially in his use of the word "adoption" as a metaphor for God's loving grace.

With all of the pressures of preparing for Christmas Day—the coming and going, the parties and presents—the Sunday following Christmas is welcome indeed.

This month could be consecrated to all hidden preparations, to children in the womb and to those who long to conceive. In February all is potency, awaiting God's redeeming act.

Simeon offers a subtle instruction to Mary: remember the cross.

Many Christians can name the hour and the place of their salvation. For me it was answering not one but two altar calls at Billy Graham crusades in the 1960s. For Reinhold Niebuhr, who was asked if he could name the time and place of his salvation, it was “2,000 years ago on a dusty hill named Golgotha outside Jerusalem’s wall.”

Waiting and fidelity are closely connected.

Medieval mapmakers, with their limited knowledge of distant lands and uncharted seas, sometimes depicted dragons on the far edges of their maps. Hic sunt dracones (“Here be dragons!”), they warned. Dragons do not appear on our modern maps. But bodies on the rail lines of Madrid and the streets of Fallujah leave no doubt that Something Ferocious stalks the edges of our political and religious maps. Nationalism, tribalism, empire and religion mutate in draconian forms, and we sometimes fail to recognize the beastly genes in our own DNA.

In the pattern of Jesus’ growing is the pattern to which each of us is called. Even the irony that he first became lost before he experienced this first growing—even this has meaning for every Christian. We live at a time when it is easy to feel lost. Our time and world are daunting and even defeating. But that very lostness can be the prelude to our personal growing.