The writer of this morning’s Gospel text has two words for us, “stay awake!” We preachers are grateful for such backup, not to mention the encouragement to keep alert in case I do utter something relevant to your life. But that writer did not have you in mind when he wrote the text. If I fail to keep your attention the likely reason is that you are bored, distracted, numb, or indifferent. Keeping awake under those conditions is one thing, keeping awake in the context of our Gospel today is quite another story...

When people stand up at funerals and make reference to loved ones who have died they often express deep satisfaction that their mother is now reunited with their father or visa versa. We understand this. There is something deep inside all of us that hopes to be reconnected with those we love who have died. But interestingly in this debate between two large groups within the Jewish faith those who argued for resurrection and afterlife were making their case less because of family reunification and more because a God of love would never allow anything less than perfect justice to stand. In other words a God of truth and mercy would never allow injustice to stand...

For relaxation I like to watch authors share portions of their new book and then take questions from the audience, a bookstore found somewhere across the United States. Usually I just type “Politics and Prose”, the name of my all-time favorite bookstore (Washington, DC), into the youtube search engine. Many authors and book titles appear and then I scroll down till I find a topic or author that holds my interest. Last Sunday I did this and felt immediately drawn to Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It by Roman Krznaric...

This week I spent time with three different families discussing plans to celebrate their loved ones lives. In two of these visits I was meeting the family for the first time. Those funerals present a challenge, how to get to know enough about the person who has died to make the service a meaningful time as family and friends celebrate a life. In 26 years I have learned questions to ask, to be patient with the responses and to keep asking for stories. Facts only go so far, obituaries are limited, only stories reveal the character and personality of the woman or man we mourn...

As a Minister I occasionally get calls from people with really happy news. I receive calls from new parents, from couples who are engaged, from new faces in the church who are finding a home at Bethany, from someone who had a test result that came back negative, from someone who received a surprise birthday present.

But more often than not the call is not good news. “My son is not doing well in school.” “I found a lump.” “I got laid off at work.” “My spouse left me.” “I don’t think I can live alone anymore.” “I can’t stop thinking about my loved one, s/he died two years ago. Isn’t it supposed to be getting better by now?”

And that’s the personal stuff. When our news was filled with stories about the refugees living in over-crowded camps I got calls. When the weather is particularly strange and unpredictable and climate change has us worried about the world our children will inherit, I get calls. When it seemed like murdered and missing aboriginal women were being reported every week with no end in sight for our First Nations communities, I got calls...

A few years ago I read an article about a woman who had died and left her entire estate to three charities. This woman lived in a small town in Nova Scotia where she had worked her whole life. A government employee, this woman never married, had no children and had accumulated all of her wealth from her own income. None of that would normally merit an article. Except the amount of the donation was millions of dollars. That’s hard to imagine. My first thought was that she must have inherited some of this fortune or perhaps won the lottery. Not true, the article included an interview with the Executor who shared that this woman had lived a very frugal life, had no commitments in her lifetime and had invested every cent of her income left over after basic services were paid...

There was a time in my life when I went to a lot of movies. Not now. In the 1980’s and 90’s I went to a movie a month. Now I am lucky to get to one a year. I don’t think movies are getting worse. Rather, I just that I have less free time. Movies are great for preachers, they tell stories in powerful ways, stories that are not only compelling in terms of the people we meet in the movie and follow till the ending but what these lives and these stories tell us about our lives, others’ lives, the world around us. Often when I am trying to explain someone, a family, a community, a culture, the best I can do to describe them is to refer to a film or scene from a film or character in a film...

One of the texts available to those Holy men who discussed and selected which books would be inserted into the Canon of Scripture was the Gospel of Thomas. It did not make the cut. But included in this book is a story much like the one we heard this morning in the Gospel of Luke, also found in the Gospel of Matthew. “Jesus said, the Kingdom is like a shepherd who had a hundred sheep. One of them went astray; it was the largest. He left the ninety-nine and sought for the one until he found it. After he had exerted himself, he said to the sheep, I love you more than the ninety-nine...”

Some of you know I have a part-time job in Dartmouth North and downtown Dartmouth helping people on Income Assistance access employment readiness programs. To do this work I need to be aware of all the great programs in our city that help people overcome barriers to employment. Last week I met the staff at Futureworx, a non-profit agency that trains Income Assistance clients so that they are ready to work at local restaurants and hotels...

Dorothee Soelle in her book The Strength of the Weak: Toward a Christian Feminist Identity tells the story of a Rabbi who asked his students how to recognize the moment when night ends and day begins. “Is it when, from a great distance, you can tell a dog from a sheep?” one student asked. “No,” said the Rabbi. “Is it when, from a great distance, you can tell a date palm from a fig tree?” another student asked. “No,” said the Rabbi. “Then when is it?” the students asked. “It is when you look into the face of any human creature and see your brother or your sister there. Until then, night is still with us."...

This morning’s sermon looks at chapters 6 & 7 of the text: Necessary Suffering and Home and Homesickness. This is the third part of our five part series on Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward. In the first sermon I shared with you Rohr’s belief that all of us need, crave, hunger for, a sense of identity, a set of beliefs, rituals, ways to make sense of the world we have inherited. This experience comes to us, or it doesn’t, at different parts of our chronological lives...

Richard Rohr’s book title Falling Upward is truly counter intuitive. In our culture, how we were raised, to fall, to fall on your face, is to be a loser. Ask Donald Trump! Trump defeated 16 other Republicans, most Governors, Senators, Congressmen, largely on his tweets and verbal assaults in debates and rallies, where he would label those who praised him as winners, good people, success stories and those who dared criticize him as idiots, losers, failures, disasters. And I am only using the kinder words he used...

For the next five weeks I will be sharing with you insights I have found in the pages of Fr. Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward. This morning’s sermon looks at the first two chapters of the text: The Two Halves of Life and The Hero and The Heroine’s Journey. 

In 1988 my life was at a crossroads. I had just completed a six month work term with Frontier College teaching English to recent immigrants in the far, far north...