I have a small sunroom in the back of my house where I often sit and watch the birds at the feeder. I watch them as they quibble and fight over the seeds in the feeder, some birds chasing other birds away (I assume the dominant ones win). I fill the feeder almost every day so there is always enough. I was thinking how much that reminds me of us. We are able to be fed with abundant choices and amounts in our grocery stores. But yet, there are some who cannot come to the total banquet because of...

By the time we reach the end of January all the celebrations are over: Hanukkah, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Kwanza, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, and Epiphany. It is now time to work on our New Year’s resolutions and get on with our daily life and get back to our routine. Now, what do we do for the next eleven months of 2024? In Matthew’s Gospel we hear the words “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few.” There are many people who are troubled and lost. Many who are doing without...

Elijah, a prophet who operated in the northern kingdom of Israel in the ninth century BCE, is one of the most mysterious figures of scripture. He was among the few survivors of a general persecution of prophets initiated by King Ahab and his wife Jezebel after they had introduced worship of the Canaanite god Baal. Dressing in rough camel hair and fed by ravens, Elijah survived in the desert. Eventually God compelled him to confront the king with a test of power over Baal by bringing fire to...

Most of us have lost someone in our lifetime, a parent, a sibling, a child, a spouse, or a loving friend. Grief is expressed in many ways. We sometimes feel shock, there is a feeling of loss that affects the pit of our stomach. Sometimes we are angry or we feel “spaced out” because the loss is forever. In the midst of this loss we may even have trouble believing our loved one is gone and, in some cases, we feel that we too would like to go to where our loved one is. The depth of our grief and...

Why do so many people today find faith and trust so difficult? Is it possible that we first need to master what we know before we understand what we believe? The Old Testament words of Isaiah says: “unless you believe, you will not understand”(7:9) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian of the 1930 – 1940’s who was killed by the Nazi’s, wrote that unless you obey, you cannot believe. Bonhoeffer raised the price of belief to obedience. These comments and thoughts are not to discourage the...

In his book A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens opens with the line: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” Dickens, who wrote his book in the mid-nineteenth century was certainly commenting on the moral and political climate of his day. Today we could still say the same. At times the darkness seems to be overpowering light. But yet life for us is not so difficult that we cannot get through it. Perhaps we all want the...