Peering into the darkness. Talking about it. It’s what women do. And at this time in history, when women are looking squarely into the darkness of sexual misconduct, rape, and gun violence, we in the religious life delve deep into the story of women who peered into the darkness, found their souls transformed, and changed history. Mary, the mother of Jesus, saw...
Read MoreRead More
At age eighteen, I didn’t drink coffee. I was a tea drinker, specifically Earl Gray. But that changed in Puerto Rico one summer when I lived with a family who invited me to stay with them while I worked at their church’s Vacation Bible School. They’d given me the only private room in their small house. I’d have been happy...
Read MoreRead More
Ethnic boundaries: apparently even Jesus had trouble with them. Case in point: Sunday’s Gospel reading from Matthew 15:21-28. A woman from "the outside," known as the Canaanite woman, spars with Jesus and convinces him to heal her daughter. And Jesus is oddly cranky about the whole thing, at least in the beginning. (Note: The Canaanite woman to which Matthew refers is...
Read MoreRead More
No human being in the New Testament -- besides Jesus -- listens better than Mary of Bethany. As we go deeper into Holy Week and come closer to the cross, consider the unmatched gift she gave him: the deep and profound gift of listening. And it’s not just a gift for him --for through her endeavor, we learn how profoundly active real listening...
Read MoreRead More
"Jesus died and rose from the dead." While not exactly a ho-hum expression, we often take it for granted. Think then, of the resurrection from another angle: What if no one had been there when Jesus walked out of that tomb? Would he have slogged through the streets of Jerusalem, perhaps winding up at Peter’s house? Would he have made his way to...
Read MoreRead More
It seems that the world has been filled with purple this week in memory of Prince…but for those of us who love stories of women in the Bible, the color purple also belongs to Lydia. And Lydia comes up this Sunday, in the RSV lectionary. Lydia’s biblical story, recounted in Acts 16:13-15, begins near water outside the town of Philippi, where...
Read MoreRead More
No human being in the New Testament, besides Jesus, listens better than Mary of Bethany. As we go deeper into Lent and come closer to the cross, consider the unmatched gift she gave him: the deep and profound gift of listening. And it’s not just a gift for him—for through her endeavor, we learn how profoundly active and passionate real...
Read MoreRead More
My mother-in-law always grieved Leonard, her tall and handsome father. She was three when he died; he was twenty-eight. He was a millworker in the woolen mills of Lawrence: young and healthy one week and gone the next. Family history says that he went into Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in 1918, thirty long miles away, and "didn’t come out." Best...
Read MoreRead More
Unlike most of the world, God does not throw away old people. Nor does God assign women to lesser or unimportant roles. A robust example of being valued--as a woman and an old person--is found in Luke 1. Here, the classic story about Elizabeth, the relative to whom Mary ran when she was newly pregnant with Jesus, is brims over with life and...
Read MoreRead More
For the better part of forty years, Mary didn’t do anything for me. And that sounds like something a loser would say: “Hey, Mary didn’t do anything for me…” Except, of course, she did something that no one has ever done; something that no one else will ever do. She gave birth to Jesus, the Prince of Peace, the Redeemer. Surely...
Read MoreRead More