God of life and beauty: We pray for the quietness of snowflakes, knowing that love is quiet. We pray for the kindness of small acts, knowing gentleness is fragile....

We seek life’s meaning in the wonder of morning In the freshness of springtime, And in each others hearts and minds. Yet still we hope for something more, A break in the ordinary, An infusion of the unexpected, An explosion of glory, A miracle, Revealing more than we hope to understand.

It was Spring. At long last there was no hint of snow on the ground. It was even warm, sort of. Birds and bugs had, at last, returned to Milwaukee. And so in the great flush of Spring madness, Jan and I decided it was time to barbecue....

Early spring awakens memories of a deeper cold and hopes of a warmer wetness, sprouting seeds and budding branches. Gray trees on gray sky screen eyes from all that lies waiting: the color of a million flowers, the feathers of migrating songbirds, the blossoming smiles of friends. Soon we will no...

I invite you now into a quiet time, a time for spoken and silent contemplation. Spirit of Life, we have come into each other's presence this day seeking a part of ourselves, knowing that we do not live alone, and knowing we cannot live fully if we are for ourselves alone....

We bid you welcome on this first Sunday of the new year. Like Janus we gather with part of us looking backward and part of us looking forward. We gather on the edge of the new year saddened by our losses, cherishing our joys, aware of our failures, mindful of days gone by....

On a foggy Christmas Eve, Santa realized Rudolph could make the difference in guiding the sleigh.

Your presence here in such numbers today is a wonderful indicator that this congregation is important to you and to people you love....

Last spring, I got a message from the universe. Now I don’t get too many messages from the universe; sometimes I don’t even get my phone messages. But this message was very loud, and it came at four in the morning in the form of a tremendous thud from my closet. This particular message was one...

The question for us today is: What does it mean for us to live steadfast in our faith, for us to risk faithfully as a congregation?

I want to tell you right up-front that I am unabashedly pro-life. I am also unashamedly pro-abortion. What I am not is unequivocally running for political office! Now, some of you might consider my reproductive platform to be oxymoronic. The fact is that many of us find ourselves in this place of...

It is 2 a.m. I am sleeping in the chaplain’s on-call room at an inner city hospital. My room hovers over the Emergency Entrance and the darkness is punctuated with sirens and lights. It is my night to be available for those unexpected things that happen in the night. But, unlike most of my calls,...

It was in Alaska, right before the first Gulf War, that I first realized how music can “teach us how to hear the world differently,” as jazz critic Jed Rasula once said. I was in the Air Force “Gateway to the West” jazz band and my unit was temporarily deployed to Alaska, waiting anxiously...

After I graduated from college, I worked for Planned Parenthood for several years. Most days, I walked through protestors to get to work. They usually carried crosses and said things like, "Jesus will forgive you if you repent for your work." It turned out that the most revolutionary thing I did...

A former South African paramilitary commander looks across his dining room table into the interviewer's camera. He is in his early sixties, overweight, with short gray hair. He wears glasses and a polo shirt. It's late morning. He explains: "We were at war. We believed that if the Blacks were...

Moses was a rancher. Long before he became a famous Biblical patriarch who led his people to freedom from slavery, he was a simple rancher. And this simple rancher was tending his flock on the side of a mountain one day circa 1527 BCE, when he came upon a small forest fire—a burning bush. He was...

It has been a not-so-quiet week in Lake Wobegon! On Monday, I found that, apparently over a long period of time, a large sum of money was taken from me. What I thought I had safely saved toward some of my future dreams was gone! Have any of you ever been robbed? Do you remember how it felt to be...

Readings 1: The Gospel of Mark, Chapter 14, verses 3-91 While he was at Bethany, in the house of Simon the Leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came in with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head....

Go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is.