Matthew 2:1-12 If you ever want to hear a good story, ask me about the New Year’s Eve I spent in Paris when I was 19 years old.  It’s a long story, full of twists and turns, so I can’t tell you the entire thing now.  But, sufficed to say, the fact that I still […]

Matthew 1:18-25 On Tuesday night we’ll hear the story once again – the familiar words from the Gospel of Luke.  Angels, a Roman census, worried parents, a young mother, a manger, shepherds, and a star.  It’s a beautiful and compelling story.  There is something magical in it that makes us want to tell it over […]

Matthew 3:1-12 In 1948, an African American congregation in Alabama hired a new minister.  They were an upper-class urban congregation and worshipped in a very traditional style.  Thus, they were eager to hire a traditional minister, one with a wife who would teach Sunday School and perhaps play the piano, with a few children – […]

Isaiah 2:1-5 In 1999, hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians were driven from their homes to camps in Macedonia by the Serbian military.  It came in the midst of a brutal conflict, the scars of which are still not healed today.  Chris Hondros, a famed war photographer, captured an image in May of that year […]

A few weeks ago, a woman stopped by the church to talk to me about an idea she had to help the unhoused in the Winona community.  She and I serve on the poverty roundtable together and she is full of ideas and energy.  Anyway, that particular afternoon she had her young son with her.  […]

One of the things I love about preaching from the lectionary, or the three-year cycle of scripture, is I am often given a text that I would otherwise never choose.  This is one of them.  I have sat with this scripture all week, mulling over it.  Whether it has been in the car as I […]

I remember the moment as if it were yesterday.  I was sitting in a conference room across from David, the associate pastor of the church I was serving as a student pastor.  He was a young man, about the age I am now, and he had been assigned to be my teacher and guide as […]

I can’t remember if I have shared this here before, but it is only fair that you all know that I am a Sunday School drop-out.  I think I did maybe two or three years of Sunday School total.  I didn’t start attending a church at all until I was 10 years old.  And, while […]

This season marks my 6th as a season ticket holder to the Minnesota Opera.  I love the music, I love the soaring melodies, I love the staging, I love the drama, I love the costumes.  I love to sit and watch art in action.  And, I love how uncomplicated most of the characters are.  The […]

My first semester of my senior year of high school, I took physics.   I did, surprisingly, fairly well in that class.  Except for one thing.  We had a project, like many high school physics classes do, of making a rocket out of a 2-liter soda bottle.  The lesson, as I recall, was about aerodynamics.  We […]