by whitneyrice

How We Fear God’s Love

God has been trying to get one message through to us for our entire lives, L-O-V-E in great big skywriting with the bass pumped up and the speakers on full blast, and we’re so off in our own worlds we never hear this glorious music made of God’s love that forms the very substance of every breath we breathe.

Joseph was in this very situation in our lesson from Genesis today.

He has been through a lot with his brothers.

They were his heroes when he was a little boy running around the sheepfolds.

Then he started to dream.

In his innocence he couldn’t understand why they became angry when he told them his visions of sheaves of grain and the sun, moon, and stars.

His childhood ended the day they left him to die in a pit in the desert and then sold him into slavery with the Ishmaelites.

He started to build a life for himself in Potiphar’s household but then it all came crashing down through no fault of his own and he found himself locked away in jail for two years.

This time he wasn’t the one dreaming. Continue reading

The Ghost on the Water

If you are awake at 3 a.m., there is probably something wrong.

You might be having fun if you’re partying that late, but you’re probably past your prime and have had a few too many drinks.

If you are awake at 3 a.m. and not a drunk college student, the most likely explanation is that you are up with a sick child, you are lying in bed worrying about losing, finding, or keeping a job, you are sitting by a hospital bed having been told your loved one is unlikely to survive the next twenty-four hours, or are facing some other catastrophe, large or small.

The disciples in our gospel story today are quite literally in the same boat.

The wind has been against them their entire journey, and they are being battered by the waves. The land is far away and their boat is small. Continue reading

My Starving Soul: Spiritual Food Insecurity

I honestly don’t have a generous bone in my body. It’s terrible.

Some people are naturally giving, scattering their resources with joy and never counting the cost.

How very much I wish I were one of them.

I am at heart simply a selfish person.

My sisters remember from our childhood how bad I was at sharing.

All my giving is an act of conscious will that I sometimes have to just force myself to do—not a great characteristic for a priest.

That’s why I so desperately need our gospel story today, and why I pray so often for God to teach me to be generous.

Selfishness is a basic human trait, but underneath it there is something deeper: fear. Continue reading

And I Did Not Know It: Jacob Goes To Mt. Rushmore

A rock, a ladder and a promise to a man who is running for his life.

That is what we get in our story from Genesis today.

Jacob is in a very bad situation.  He stole not only his brother Esau’s birthright, but also his blessing, and Esau has finally had enough.

Esau resolves in Genesis 27 to set aside a decent time of mourning for his father Isaac, but once it is over, he will kill Jacob.

Rebekah finds out and tells Jacob he needs to get out of town, fast.  So Jacob sets out.

There is very little that is admirable about Jacob.

Even his name means “cheater,” and he lives up to it every time.

We might even question why God keeps providing for him, why God continues to come through for him, why God chooses him to be the vessel through which the entire nation of Israel will be built.

We should actually take God’s choice of Jacob as great good news.

Why?  Because it takes away the burden and the illusion of personal worthiness being necessary for us to serve God. Continue reading

I’d Rather Be Esau

Sibling rivalry.

What a familiar story that is.

With four sisters to choose from, I had plenty of sisters with whom to compete as a child.

We all had our distinct roles in the family.

My older sister Maggie was the rebel.

I was the goody two-shoes.

My little sister Merideth was the consummate middle child, and the twins, Ginny and Kitty, lived in a secret twin society of their own.

Over the years there were many alliances and counter-alliances, trade negotiations for toys, peace talks over games, and so on.

Jacob and Esau had clearly defined roles as well.

The scripture says that “Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents.”

Genesis makes no bones of the fact that there were distinct favorites as well: “Isaac loved Esau, because he was fond of game; but Rebekah loved Jacob.”

In a patriarchal society, a father’s approval was everything, and like any young boy Jacob would have longed for his father’s attention and favor.

But it was not to be. Continue reading

Bible Wikileaks

Because there must have been a paper trail, right? These four documents were sent to this publication from an anonymous whistle-blower, and published here because the people have a right to know…

Continue reading

Idiot Faith

Right.  This has got to be one of the most messed up stories in the Old Testament.

Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, I mean.

And it’s not like we have a scarcity of truly disturbing stories in the OT.

There’s David deliberately sending Uriah to be killed so he can hook up with Bathsheba.

There’s Cain killing his own brother Abel over an agricultural misunderstanding.

And that favorite for family fun, Jael inviting Sisera into her tent, tucking him in for a nap, and then driving a tent peg through his skull.  Charming!

I mean, it’s just terrifying and there’s no other way around it.

Put Abraham and Isaac into a modern context.

Picture a man holding a gun to his ten-year-old son’s head, ready to pull the trigger.

There would be SWAT teams aiming laser-guided assault rifles at him from behind parked police cars, police and news helicopters buzzing overhead broadcasting the standoff live around the world, and a hostage negotiator over a bullhorn, begging the father to stand down and asking him why he would want to kill his son.

The answer?

“Because God told me to do it.” Continue reading

Six Weddings and a Funeral for My Arrogant Discipleship

“One midnight hospital vigil, one funeral, one new job, one dead mouse under the kitchen sink smelling up the whole church, one brave parishioner kind enough to deal with said mouse, one interview with the paper, one never-ending church directory project concluded, two sermons written…and six weddings. A week in the insane and fabulous life of being a priest.”

That’s what I posted on Facebook last night thinking over the adventure of the last seven days.

Last Monday when I looked over my calendar and across the expanse of the week ahead, I could never have imagined everything that would transpire.

I thought it would be relatively quiet, organizing everything I need to arrange before I go on vacation, making sure the wheels of the parish will continue to turn while I’m gone.

Little did I know that in one short week I would have some of the most powerful spiritual experiences of my ministry thus far, and learn that I was completely wrong about my own role in them. Continue reading

The Slave and The Virgin

Jesus in the gospels is like that friend who 50% of the time is awesome to be around and 50% of the time is saying the most awful, awkward things that no one wants to hear.

We get a little bit of both in our gospel story today.

We have the beautiful teaching of the value of the sparrows and the hairs of our head being numbered, and then the somewhat less beautiful teaching of Jesus coming to bring a sword instead of peace and the guarantee that dysfunctional family life will continue well into the establishment of the Kingdom of God.

It is passages like this that make me admire Mary, Jesus’ mother, even more than I already do.

She has seen Jesus act out this very teaching. From his seeming lack of politeness at the wedding at Cana to asking people who are his mother and brothers and sisters, appearing to reject her entirely, she has seen it all and still sticks by him all the way to the Cross.

But we know of course that Jesus loved his mother, even valued her highly in the leadership of the disciples, in which she took an even greater role after his ascension.

The gospels don’t tell us of the more tender moments between them, we have to imagine those. Continue reading

God’s Losing Bet

God is a reckless romantic, driven by love to the point of poor decision-making.

That is what is revealed to us by the actions of the Trinity in creation, which we read today.

Far from a dry and repetitive etiology, the first two chapters of Genesis are a shockingly intimate portrait of the inner nature of God.

Through this outpouring of creativity, in the midst of this transcendently powerful generation of new life, we see the most hidden and intimate desire of God—to share God’s love through every atom of creation.

Creation is the work of the Word in the largest sense, the trees and the sky and the waters and us all spoken into existence on the breath of the Spirit from the mouth of God, for which Jesus will live and die and live again.

The nature of Trinity Sunday encourages us to think and talk about big, beautiful theological concepts, ideas that are too large for our minds but somehow fill our hearts with energy and light.

We are invited to dwell in the mystery of God, marveling at how God reveals Godself to us and longing for the day when we leave this earthly life and finish looking through a glass darkly, finally seeing God face to face.

But what does it all mean practically?

How can the theological doctrines of our faith, the ideas about God that are a hard-won mix of gut-level instinct about God and carefully worked-out intellectual exploration of God, help us to live better and deeper Christian lives? Continue reading