Lenten Devotional 2016

Friday February 19 A few years, I heard about a fascinating conversation at a program at Andover Newton Theological School. The speaker was Brian McLaran, a leader in what is often called the “Emerging Church,” a movement of folks seeking new ways to do church. McLaran was talking about the kingdom of God.  A hand […]

Thursday, February 18 Thy kingdom come, thy will be done….. Pete Seeger’s wife, Toshi, is known to have said that she would have preferred that her husband had an affair with another woman than to be in love with the whole world.  I’m not sure how that would have panned out for her, but it’s […]

Wednesday, February 17 “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…” Each Christmas, one of my closest childhood friends donates a poinsettia in my name to Edwards Church to decorate our sanctuary. In the spring I plant it in my garden.  Over the last four or five years I […]

Tuesday, February 16 “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…” The Lord’s Prayer is considered by many scholars to be a poem in the ancient Jewish liturgical tradition.  Its language is at once expressive and figurative. I have long been enamored of poetic forms.  I’ve been reading and […]

Monday, February 15 “Do you know what I mean…thy kingdom come, thy will be done?” Grandma was sincere. She wanted to know that I knew what Jesus meant and I didn’t! What was a kingdom? We had a president and growing up across the street from Valley Forge Park, I knew we had fought a […]

Sunday, February 14     “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name” A church musician considers the Bible in terms of lyrics of hymns and anthems, not simply as spoken verses to be memorized. One of the beauties of our trade, in fact, is the truth that we have committed to memory […]

Saturday, Feb. 13 Our  Father Who Art In Heaven, Hallowed Be Thy Name… In my first grade Sunday School Class we spent an entire year memorizing The Lord’s Prayer.  After awhile when we would begin the prayer I would envision God as a tall man with long hair and a beard, sitting on a hill […]

Friday, Feb 12–Nena Our  Father Who Art In Heaven, Hallowed Be Thy Name… I learned the Lord’s Prayer as a young child.  Each night as the stars emerged I would kneel at the side of my wooden bed with my hands in a prayerful pose saying these words.  It has been more than a half-century […]

Thursday, February 11, 2016 When I was just 10 years old, I felt my first call to ministry.  Church was one of those places where I felt I could fully be myself, a place where I felt fully loved by what seemed like a whole lot of people. One of the things that I excelled […]

Ash Wednesday, February 10, 2016 In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no […]