Featured Births (a poem) I was reminded of a poem I love today while working on my Quaker Heritage Day talks. It’s written by a Canadian Quaker (and friend of mine) named Julie Robinson. The poem is found in her pamphlet called: Openings: A Poet’s Encounter with Elizabeth Fry (Woodbrooke Journal 2008
Featured To Bless and Not to Curse (Openings and Closures): Romans 12:14 Bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse. Romans 12:14 Queries :: 1. What does it really mean to bless/curse another person with language? 2. In what ways have I been a recipient of both blessings or curses? How have these things impacted my life? 3. What
Featured Queries for Discernment and Seeking I was asked by the clerk of a committee I am on to guide worship the other day. He wanted me not to prepare a sermon but rather help prepare our hearts and minds for doing work around discernment. The point for us as a group was to hold that
Blog Entries Prayer as Song I’ve been thinking about prayer today, and the many ways we pray that are not simply meal-time prayers (God thank you for the food). I came across Psalm 104:33 in my reading this morning which makes this point clearly: I will sing to the LORD as long as
Featured Preparatory Materials for Quaker Heritage Day (Part 1) Heralding The New Creation: Mission as Participation in the Quaker TraditionQuaker Heritage Day: Berkeley Friends ChurchFebruary 12, 2011 Here are some quotes, Scripture, and Queries for personal preparation for our gathering together at Quaker Heritage Day. I may add more to this (thus the part 1) but I may not.
The Pastorate Peace Through Equality: Lucretia Mott, Paul and MLK (Galatians 3:26-29) This was the message I gave this morning based on Galatians 3:26-29. First we discussed some of these queries: 1. What do you think the connections between peace and equality are in the passages above? 2. In what ways have I experienced inequality in my own life or around
Featured Heralds of Peace (Luke 10) This morning the big word, the word of the day for all you Pee-Wees Playhouse fans in the congregation, is participation. It is a word that signals collective activity, collaboration, co-operation, co-mmunity, co-laboring. A mutual working together in small ways that add up over time. It might conjure up
Christmas Christmas Sermon: We Have Observed His Star (Matthew 2) Posted a few weeks late, here’s my Christmas Sermon. The Birth Announcement And suddenly, out of nowhere, the Magi see a star in the sky. Magi – magicians, astrologers, wise-learned men and women, non-Jews from east of Palestine (maybe Arabia, Persia, Babylon?) – these are the people (it doesnt say
Blog Entries Queries for Grounding Our Work in Place I have been thinking a lot more about place, context and community that has been usual for me. I have blogged about this already a couple times (escapism and goals). But there are some queries I have been thinking about for awhile and that I have stuck to my computer
Featured Thinking About Goals for 2011 I’ve been thinking about what my goals are for this coming year. I don’t know if these would constitute “resolutions,” I’ve never been big on those, but here is what I have so far. I want to: 1. Accomplish less. This past year was crammed jammed full
Featured All My Favorite People Are Grieving This morning we did a worship and prayer service around making “peace with loss.” Through prayers, songs, silence and the lighting of candles we remembered the many who have lost loved ones in the past year, and considered those who have suffered loss in other ways as well. In some
Blog Entries My Favorite Albums From 2010 In the past I’ve done more of a write up on the albums I really enjoyed from the previous year, but as I went through my catalog I realized that I didn’t have a lot of new albums that I was in love with. What I noticed was
The Pastorate Resource: Christmas Eve Candlelight Service Every Christmas Eve we have a very nice, contemplative candlelight service. This gathering goes for about 45-60 minutes, includes scripture reading, poetry, prayers and music. Oh and plenty of candles. The second one also has three readers. You are free to download the resources here and use them however you
Church in Mission Creating Communities of “Artists” This morning I noticed a torn piece of paper with something I’d written on it from awhile back: * How do we form a community that creates artists rather than just critics? * Justice should always come first, justice is innovative. I am not sure what I was reading when I
Featured Lineage, Belt Buckles and the BIG US. (Matthew 1:1-25) Here’s my sermon from December 19th. This morning is the fourth and final week of advent. We have travelled long and far in our discussion this advent season, and hopefully some of the ideas, stories and experiences you have had thus far have been meaningful, maybe even transformative, to
Featured Year-End Wrap-Up and Popular Posts from 2010 This has been a pretty good year for Gathering In Light (as a blog) and it’s always fun to do a little year-end wrap up. For one, I’m surprised to see that I had 150 or so posts this year. Considering how much seemed to have happened this
The Cultural Has Christmas Lost its Power? Going through Christmas this year I began to wonder if Christmas has lost it’s power as a symbol and sign in our culture today. Symbols can lose power over time and when this happens there needs to be a reformation of those symbols and signs, or a letting go
Blog Entries Christmas has always belonged to other traditions – Max Carter I always enjoy Max Carter’s perspective, a f/Friend from North Carolina, a Conservative Quaker, and educator. His reflection this week on Christmas and Christians who celebrate the holiday is well worth the read. Do you need to be Christian to celebrate Christmas? What is Christmas all about? Is
Blog Entries A little surprise from Google Claus A few weeks back google posted that they were going to be giving away a limited number of their new Chrome OS laptops for testing and everyone was welcome to apply. So I did just that. And low and behold, a little box arrived on the doorstep today! I can
Blog Entries Book Giveaway Winners Announced The “Spirit Rising” book giveaway is now over and we have three winners: 1. Christine 2. T. Vail Palmer Jr. 3. Lyndsey Congratulations and Merry Christmas. I’ll be contacting you shortly.
Featured From Hearing to Seeing: Matt. 11 Interestingly, the act of hearing is initially stressed in Matthew 11:2ff: 2 When John heard in prison what the Messiah* was doing, he sent word by his* disciples 3and said to him, Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another? John sends
Blog Entries Upcoming Berkeley Visit: Quaker Heritage Day Flyer, etc. Hi all, many of you have already seen that I’ll be doing the talks at Quaker Heritage Day this year hosted by Berkeley Friends Church (find more info here). I know I’ve mentioned it a few times but if any of you are anywhere near Berkeley you should
Featured The Question: John the Baptist’s “Are you the One?” Matt. 11 Here are some thoughts from a portion of my message this past Sunday on Matt. chapter 11. In Matthew chapter 11 we find John again sending his disciples out (as he did in Matt. 9) to get a little scouting report on Jesus. This time John is in prison because,
Featured Book Giveaway: Three Copies of Spirit Rising: Young Quaker Voices I don’t know about you but I love free books! So, in the spirit of Christmas I wanted to gift three people with a copy of the book I helped edit and love to share around. The book was published this year by Quaker Press and has been well
digital detox Logging off from Facebook and Twitter Some of you have probably noticed my absence already but last Friday I logged off of Facebook and Twitter for the month of december. Call it a digital detox, social media vacation or just plan weird but I decided I really needed a break over the advent season so that
