“Today is Trinity Sunday, the Sunday after Pentecost, when good preachers give bad sermons and bad preachers give you a blow-by-blow of Athanasian Creed. For my part, I’m stuck this week on the words of the Second Council of Constantinople in 553: ‘One of the Trinity was crucified in the flesh.’ In other words, to believe in the Holy Trinity—to say that Jesus is God—is to say that when Jesus of Nazareth suffered and died on the Cross, God suffered and died on the cross. And so it is that ‘theologically speaking,’ as the great American theologian James Cone writes in his final work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, ‘Jesus was the “first lynchee.”’”

“Although we long to be in each other’s homes, we do find common healing in God’s home - the outdoors. That is where we can find relief right now… and it is outdoors that different people can find the different gifts of the spirit - some are awed, some find counsel in walks with friends, some study nature and build their knowledge on family hikes, some share wisdom about planning a vegetable first garden, some seek understanding of their own muddled, frustrated thoughts sitting on the front steps at midnight with their mom, some find that the holiness of our sanctuary is also any space outside where they can see other people again, strangers or family or neighbors, kept safer by open air, wind, the Holy Spirit.”

“If you were to look up depictions of the Ascension, and if you were to scroll past a lot of the pictures of Jesus levitating upwards like Buzz Lightyear, you might come across a strange image with two feet at the top of the icon, rising over the heads of the disciples, dangling down. Usually, you just see Christ’s ankles, hanging over the scene like a chandelier, and his feet are arched down like wings, splayed apart… It’s a strange scene, these disciples around their sacred object, in the midst of worship. Not beholding the Trinity, not behold Jesus reigning in power; lost in wonder, love, and praise, as they stare at a pair of wounded feet.”

“The Epicurean gods are absent and quiet, and you should be too. The Stoic God is present, but loveless, and you should be too. And then here comes Paul crashing into the Roman world with a message about a very different kind of God. For Paul and for most other Jews, God was not the petty and capricious superhuman of Greek folk religion, nor was God the indifferent-but-happy Creator of the Epicureans or the universal Mind of the Stoics. God comes to us in the world, but God is not of the world. God interacts with us, but God doesn’t act like us.“

“We are, all of us, ‘walking through the valley of the shadow of death’; not just now, but always, every day of our human lives. It’s a beautiful image for a grim situation. Imagine a flock of sheep wandering through the Judean countryside. These aren’t the happy green hills like the Emerald Isle or your old Windows XP background, but the dry and rocky hills east of Jerusalem, where the mountains roll down to the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. Picture the flock walking down into a deep valley, a dry river-bed, in the late afternoon, as it suddenly becomes dusk.”

“Emmaus can be the one-click purchase, or the pint of ice-cream, the ‘one more drink,’ or the secret lusts or fantasies of the heart. Here is one thing to note from the outset: while the disciples are on their way to intoxicate their sorrows at the Comfort Pub, Jesus doesn’t condemn them.He doesn’t say, ‘why are you going there? Why are you trying to mend your heart with that which can’t mend?’ He doesn’t say any of that. He joins them on their way; as they guiltily slouch towards Emmaus, he accompanies them.”

“On this second Sunday of Easter, when we read the story of ‘Doubting Thomas,’ preachers will talk about what faith really means, why doubt is really important, or maybe—depending on how far afield they want to go—what this whole resurrection thing is really about anyway. This year, though, this story of Thomas and the other disciples feels more immediate to me. The reasons it feels relevant and interesting in other years are abstract and cognitive. This year is different. If in other years, I can identify with how Thomas thinks, this year I have a very real sense of solidarity with how the disciples feel, how they worship, what they do as they gather behind locked doors.”

“In the morning, while it was still dark, Mary went to the tomb… Did you catch that – while it was still dark Mary went to the tomb? …We’ve been awake in the dark with Mary, haven’t we?”