It’s still Christmas! Mid-Christmas we have the most Christmasy of feasts, the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus on 1 January. Today’s readings feature a most beloved and most often misinterpreted text, “a young woman is (already) pregnant,” Isaiah 7:14. Our spiritual ancestors looked back to the Greek version of this text in which...... Read More

More Christmas! We have a Christmas triduum! (And more to come after a short interlude.) For the First Sunday After Christmas, which falls on the day after Christmas this year, Year W focuses on the human estate, the flesh in which God was pleased to dwell, our very human flesh. In the first lesson we...... Read More

A whole lot of Christmas going on! Three sets of readings for The Day (and non-liturgical eve). Christmas I: A prophet combines the theme of pregnant expectation with the hope of resurrection, irresistible to Christian readers who cannot help but to read backwards with the evangelists through the prism of the life, death and, resurrection...... Read More

In Advent we await the birth of a Savior, a Redeemer, who is but a babe. This week the Holy Child receives literary company in the little boy Samuel at his mother’s breast. These two women, Mary and Hannah, encounter God in extraordinary ways, unmediated by the men around them and as a result bear...... Read More

Another week in Advent, another annunciation. This time the woman is not named, her son will be, Samson the strong. Like Yocheved (Jochebed) the mother of Moses, she will be the mother of Israel’s deliver. Yet this woman named many times over by the rabbis is more than a womb pressed into service. She is...... Read More

2 Timothy 2:8 Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, from the line of David [and Bathsheba]; that is my gospel… (Proper 28 Year W) In the name of God: The Author, the Word and the Translator. Amen. On October 28, I had the privilege of being seated and installed as the Right Rev. Sam B....... Read More

This week the sacred stories converge to tell a story of a holy family that extends beyond a nuclear family or even a single lineage. It begins with the family we might today call Iraqi who will become the ancestral parents of the people who will come to be called Israel, a reminder that we...... Read More

An excerpt from my womanist midrash of the story of the two sisters commonly called “Lot’s daughters” on thetorah.com. The story is usually referred to as “Lot and His Daughters” or some such locution that emphasizes Lot’s place as the protagonist of the biblical story. The story can also be read as the sisters’ story,...... Read More

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A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Year W, Proper 24 (Closest to October 19): 2 Samuel 21:1-14; Psalm 58; Revelation 6:9-11; Luke 6:43-45 Yesterday, we talked about the women’s stories in scripture that we do and do not hear taught and preached. Sometimes we don’t hear stories of women because their pieces are scattered...... Read More