Category Archives: sermons

Panleukopenia

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You do load after load of laundry, grateful for the workhorse machine from a low-tech era and the hot Texas sun–ad hoc laundry assistant

You drag the oriental rug outside, wash it like a corpse before burial, ask if it can be saved

You scrub fabric, bleaching where you can, trying to wash out a virus which will not, does not, abate.

Push aside the agony of why you have to do all this. Walk this road. Pray for the resurrection of the dead and the impossible watercolors of heaven

Our Father

Who art in heaven

Hallowed be thy name

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done

Here in us, as it is in heaven.

Leaves the 99

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I have always marveled at the risk involved in the parable of the lost sheep. In fact, I can actually see the economists in the crowd shaking their heads and coming up to J. afterwards and trying to convince him that it just doesn’t make sense.

One lost sheep? Who is gonna watch the others?

I have a tendency to worry about all the sheep. What if there are wolves? Wolves stress me out. But J is unswerving. He leaves the 99 and goes to find the one. lost. sheep.

Of course he knows some secrets.

Like: the 99 are actually supposed to watch out for each other.

Like: a few stubborn jackasses in the flock help keep the wolves at bay.

Like: I am the one lost sheep. You are the one lost sheep.

We are all lost without him.

For J every last flipping one of us is that solitary-witless-easily-confused-fluffy-lost sheep.

Sometimes the only thing one needs to do to be found is to admit that one is lost.

Real lost

Without him.

Eight Day Litany

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When Billy Graham died there was a minor brouhaha about a young woman who wished him fun in hell.

Whatever you or I may have thought about BG, he was an unabashed Eternalist. Stephen Hawking was not.

It is my belief that they both are now.

Which reminds me of a story…

A long time ago a rather counter-cultural day laborer was executed by the Romans apparently for some sort of political expediency.

His rag-tag followers were devastated (naturally), until a few days later when he came back from the dead and started appearing to people!!! (Rather supernaturally)

Although not initially to Thomas, a contemporary Aramaic friend of his, or Stephen Hawkins, a science-type from the 20th century B.C.E.

But after a bit,* he fixed this by showing up. For Thomas it came in the 20th chapter of the Good News of John. For Stephen it happened today.

Worship science all you want, or money or sex or power or fear.

But on the day we die we all turn into Eternalists…regardless of whether the science was every really on our side or not.

John 20, 21

*eight days

Preaching to the dead

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First, pick my chasuble with care: war paint, cowgirl boots, stretched-out pale-pink tutu from the racks upon racks at the resale store, brand-new for the girls who did not need them anymore,  all donated to science or the graveyard where I go to pace and splutter out some fractured  litany about a beat-up pickup truck, iterations of a lost father, lawn furniture strewn  above the tree line, the same forgotten first name of both Sikorsky and Stravinsky, and this jittery alter-ego who swings wild, shouts loud, raises hell as though bones and memory and words could be as easily strung together as that-to breath life into the dead as they fit their joints and hinges back together, back to life, the way an ordinary man rises from his bed, rubs his eyes, dons his pants and his shirt, walks out into 

Light

“There’s no base!”

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“there’s no base!” 

Exclaimed the girl–green shirt, tiny dog resembling a toy…

only real in the crook of her arm

And suddenly I get atheism–

Darwin shouts in the  schoolyard– 

no base!

And unhinging the game from…

well, base-

Another name for

The trunk of the branching oak

we rest beneath

breathing hard

before someone says

One, two, three, get off my father’s apple tree

Not to be confused with 

That one inimitable player who says

One, two, three, base all over me

And somehow, miraculously

Means it.

The Lost Cause

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I looked it up,

The thing about rainbows…when none are in sight

What do you do with a fallen, broken

Rain-drenched world?

Ignore the indirect saturation of light (filtered through heavy 

Clouds)

Put ineluctable 

Signs in the sky

Sometimes vivid, others spiraling, concentric

Insinuated into ordinary

Sunsets

Sure, I got it–rainbows

The unfortunate companions of unicorns

Neither make the boat…

Or as I prefer to think–both

The misunderstood rhino

The glinting prismatic light 

Or more importantly–James Baldwin, evoking

Saint Peter…

Fire the next time

His anger, his dungeon, his elegant use of fire

As both a noun and a verb

I can barely look straight at

That kind of righteous rage

Much less the real

God

Who raises a Son

To rudder, anchor, mast, and sail

The one and only vessel

Which could

Will

Has

Sailed the sea of fire…

the next time.


Minimum

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He says

The least of these in the language of childhood

Neither emperors nor governors nor bards

Gather the little ones

…least of these

Army of small

Wanderers in the world 

They look for a Savior

Older Brother King

Who can 

Calm the storm

Speak peace to the wind

And tell all bedtime stories

With hope at the beginning and the end

Of each hard letter 

INRI

The  least of these-

M.

Roll the stone away

Jesus of Nazareth, King of the…

Minimum.

Weighted Blanket

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in a fit of unease 

she has an out-of-body experience 

Rising above the squalor

Imagining what it would be like

To live inside the perfect house

Instead–she dusts the counters and all the edges

with cinnamon to deter the sugar ants

Beats the air with questions

Washes and re-washes clothes, stones, teeth 

Delays bodily functions  

To search for

-The weighted blanket-

Surrogate mother/synthetic comforter

Lyrics/verses 

of a lullaby sung softly by the

Real One