Dear friends, In this season of Epiphany, our gospel lessons have emphasized the Incarnation of Christ among us and his glorification – texts that set the tone for the rest of the year. They also point to the future age – the final age of the Spirit, when, as the Lord’s Prayer says, heaven and earth are joined in God’s will. We thus, in Epiphany, look forward with faith, even as we endure implacable cold, and the times in which we now live can be daunting. It takes a bit of

Dear people of God in The Episcopal Church: Like Jesus, we live in frightening times. His earthly ministry began, as we heard in Sunday’s Gospel reading , when John the Baptist was imprisoned by authorities who wanted to silence his preaching and prophesying. Jesus knew what happens when earthly powers persuade human beings to fear one another, regard one another as strangers, and believe that there is not enough to go around. In Jesus’ time, the power of these divisions m

Beloved of God, ​ So many with whom I connect in my daily life are expressing the difficulty of bearing the state of the world while continuing to function in their everyday lives. Whether from Minnesota, Venezuela, or Greenland, the news feels heavy, stressful, and frightening. Yet, just as in that first Epiphany in first-century Judea, God shows up, like a star in the sky. Like a voice from heaven proclaiming belovedness. Like a miracle and a promise of continued abundance

Dear friends, Growing up in mid-century North Central Pennsylvania, people of color were few and far between. I thought it was because they just didn’t live there, but I later learned that the KKK was meeting in the region where I grew up, and they may have encouraged persons participating in the Great Migration to just “move along.” Still, my father was a devotee of Abraham Lincoln (and as he was a funeral director, learned most of what there was to know about Lincoln’s f

Dear friends, I read this poem at the end of my sermon last Sunday and several of you asked me for it, so here it is! Bruggemann captures so well the challenge of living faithfully and abiding in the Way of Jesus in the midst of our broken world. And I love the last line--may this year be for each one of us a time of "high hope" guided by the Holy Spirit! Peace and blessings, Nancy+ Epiphany  On Epiphany day, we are still the people walking. We are still people in