[RCL] 1 Samuel 1:4-20; 1 Samuel 2:1-10; Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25; Mark 13:1-8 If ever there were a Sunday for today’s opening collect, this is it. What a gospel lesson. Hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest this gospel? It’s full of troubling images, images that cut too close to home, that sound too much…

In a church much like this one, a woman stays behind in the pews after the service. She is sitting at the back, off to the side, so no one notices her as they are tidying things up. Eventually, the priest comes back into the sanctuary to retrieve something and hears her crying. When the…

Today’s lessons are a mixture of life struggles, miracles and prophecies. The story of Hannah may resonate with numerous women in our own age. Infertility is a widespread challenge that women face, at times, silently. Hannah’s cultural context differs significantly from ours. In ancient Israel, motherhood was the epitome of accomplishments for women. Not being…

On August 23, 2011, Louisa County, Virginia, was rocked by a magnitude 5.8 earthquake. We expect such seismic activity along the Pacific coast but rarely think about it happening elsewhere. Earthquakes in Virginia are rare; however, due to the geological nature of the Eastern Seaboard, the quake’s shocks were felt as far away as Florida…

In T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Four Quartets,” he talks about going to a church at Little Gidding, the site of a small Anglican religious community founded in the seventeenth century. Eliot writes, “You are not here to verify, instruct yourself, or inform curiosity or carry report. You are here to kneel where prayer has…

How do you spend time? How will you live this day? Each of our lessons appointed for this Sunday has something to do with the end of time, with a glimpse into the question of when. When will time as we know it end? What will that time look like? And however we think of…

We are winding down the church year. Next Sunday, the feast of Christ the King, is the last Sunday in our liturgical year. After that, we begin again with Advent. As is usual for this time of year, the readings for this Sunday are about the end-times. All three of the readings for today use…

The Scriptures for today call us to pay attention to what’s going on in the world around us and to develop a perspective that will help us distinguish between false messiahs and the message of Jesus. Each of us is invited to inwardly digest this biblical story and to identify similar situations or stories in…

A father knocks on his son’s door. “Jaime,” he says, “Wake up!” Jaime answers, “I don’t want to get up, Papa.” The father shouts, “Get up, you have to go to school.” Jaime says, “I don’t want to go to school.” “Why not?” asks the father. “Three reasons,” says Jaime. “First, because it’s so dull;…