PENTECOST 14 | Eph 6:10-20 As many of you know this summer Lisa and I went to Eastern Europe for our vacation. We were looking forward to seeing Prague, Vienna, and Budapest, and those cities did not disappoint. The wildcard of our trip was Sarajevo. We were only going there because Lisa had a conference there near the end of our trip. We knew very little about it, and quite frankly, we were not hoping very much. But it was, in fact, Sarajevo that captured our hearts. We knew

I was born into an Irish-Catholic family that also honored the ancient religious traditions and heritage of our home-county. Adding to the cultural and religious mix, the first members of the two sides of my family, who came to America during the Irish Potato famine ahead of their families to establish a new home, ended up marrying Cherokee women. Once the men were well-settled they sent for their Irish wives, who were none too pleased by what they found. But by then both Ch

PENTECOST 12 | 1 Kings 19:4-8; Ps 34:1-8; Eph 4:25-5:2; sub. Mat 7:9-11 As many of you have heard, last week Lisa and I came home from a wonderful, much-needed Eastern European vacation, and I immediately wound up flat on my back from dysentery. Egad. For me, this was kind of like a visit from an old friend—and old, dangerous, deadly friend. When I was in India a few years ago, on my last sabbatical, I contracted dysentery six times. So…me and the bug are a little more than c

2 Samuel 11:26-12:13 | Ephesians 4:1-16 | John 6: 24-35 When I was a little girl, growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, I was told that because I was a girl, my survival and happiness depended upon my appearance, my ability to follow directions, and my willingness to please men. As a middle class white girl, I was told to go to college so that I could carry on a conversation with my future husband when he arrived home from work. I was told I should aspire to arranging flowers for

Yesterday I was fortunate to participate in “Zoocharist” at the Oakland Zoo, an event sponsored by an Episcopal group called Holy Hikes. Once a month this group meets outdoors to conduct a service. The idea is for people to experience God outside the walls of a church, and to feel connected with creation. For Zoocharist we started with opening prayers at the flamingos, then on to hymns and scripture readings at the elephants, prayers of the people beyond the grizzly bears, an