Never The Chameleon

Dressing your Dust Every Ash Wednesday, I am reminded of a piece I wrote not long after the death of my husband Bill: he was killed in the same accident that gave my son his brain injury. The story concerns the moments when I stood in front of my late husband’s closet, charged by the funeral home with choosing the clothes in which he’d be cremated. Two days before, this, picking out his outfit, wo...

The trouble is, we can’t have just spent the season of Advent talking about, urging, setting up repentance as an expected and holy expression of faith, and then revile those who actually have an Epiphany and up and repent. That’s the thought banging around in my head on this day when the Church marks the beginning of the season of Epiphany, and our nation marks the January 6 insurrection, and mean...

I preached the below yesterday on the last Sunday in the Christmas season and the morning after the Trump administration opted to illegally bomb Venezuela. First, the texts on which I depended, and then the sermon. ~~~~~ First Reading: Jeremiah 31:7-14   7   Thus says the Lord: Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob,  and raise shouts for the chief of the nations; proclaim, give praise, and say,  “Sav...

Given recent awareness of the increasing gap between the über wealthy and the rest of us, and the related power inequity too, a reflection on real-time conversations our nation is having about wealth inequity, with an assist from brother Lazarus and the nameless rich guy in Luke. This is a requested re-up of a sermon I preached last September when the passage came up in the RCL, but it references...

Below is a fusion of some FB posts I made about Donald Trump’s obnoxious—emphasis on the ‘noxious’—words about Somali immigrants. The season of Advent would like a word. ~~~~~ Trump’s vile, abhorrent comments about the Minnesota Somali community are reflective of long-standing and normed racism toward this community, and I renounce it. In fact, I’ve had to renounce it for close to 10 years. In 201...

Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12 Well, not gonna lie, the first and lasting image I have of these texts—and there are many images from which to choose here for this next Sunday—is that God must have holy halitosis if, as Isaiah tells us this week, it’s strong enough to kill the wicked. Can’t decide these days if I hope that God finds a mighty toothbrush or not, t...

(Technically , we are still in Advent One, so I’m technically not late to posting about this week’s texts.) If you are wealthy, privileged, or an oppressor, seatbelts, everyone: the liturgical year of Matthew is gonna be a ride. Luke, the gospel writer from whom our readings up until two Sundays ago came, well he directed his words with a slant to the poor, the dispossessed, the oppressed. Matthew...

While my entire Christian faith framework begins and ends with Easter, the bones, flesh, and soul of my personality identifies with Advent. I feel Advent on the daily, even when it isn’t Advent, although the long stretches of darkness, the stars complementing it, the haunting hymns, the preparation for Christmas make me feel utterly synchronized with the season: Quiet. Waiting. Wrestling between t...

Those of you who have sponsored and supported this Substack deserve a thank you, and an apology, and not just for the background sound of my snoring menagerie of three dogs and a cat by our Northern Minnesota wood stove! I am certain that I am not the only one who anticipated that resisting this Trump regime would be hard work. I had hoped it wouldn’t be all-consuming work. But it is. Right around...

For people who think on such things, May 13th marks the day of medieval mystic Julian of Norwich . I learned about her first in my college English class. Straight away, Dame Julian pulled me in. Her quiet, sensible, compassionate, and tender writing and love of God captured me at page one of her Revelations of Divine Love . I remember breathlessly pressing my professor, “Did she really have these...

This is the week when All Things seem to revolve around Mother’s Day, which itself is a day of raucous, rebellious history (someone needs to tell that to Hallmark), and is complicated for those who are mothers but don’t want to be, are not mothers and want to be, are children of mothers who make that challenging to be, or are children of mothers who have been but who now have died, and for those w...

Grace to you and peace from our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ. So in the early 2nd century, a fellow named Pliny the Younger was a Governor of Bithynia and Pontus. We don’t have much for which to thank Pliny, as you’ll hear, but he did write a now-famous and very valuable letter to the Roman Emperor Trajan—as a little sermonic card-tip here, he addressed it “Lord,” which in Latin was Domine ,...

There will never be a Holy Saturday when I do not say that it’s the most honest day of the Church. The pathos, angst, and grief of Good Friday gripped those around the cross and then scattered them in fear from it. The reality of Good Friday is all-too-present now, as people are being plucked from streets, out of hospitals, and even small children from elementary schools; cuts to the arts, cuts to...

Every time I write, Mrs. Rusch, my 8th Grade English teacher, hovers over my shoulder, scanning my work to find each and every dreaded Undefined This. Her antipathy for the Undefined This has so shaped my writing that decades later, after a couple of perfectly appropriate parental editing requests, each Undefined This in my daughter’s papers found a definition before they were handed over to me, b...

Apologies for the delays in uploading more podcasts! I have two submissions ready to go, but honestly, these last two weeks have been a bit on the…full side of things, and it turns out that finitude doesn’t negotiate. However, below is an upload of a sermon I’ll offer tomorrow at a local congregation where I’m honored to be preaching and presiding while their esteemed pastor is away. I hope to upl...

When studying in Palestine two years ago, my daughter Else got a tattoo on her wrist. It simply says “bodacious.” Now, I understand that for those of us with a certain vintage, that word primarily brings to mind an Excellent Adventure dude. But to Else, ‘bodacious’ is the *chef’s kiss* word to describe Mary, this mother of Jesus, and as always, she is spot on. Mary is so often portrayed to be taci...

Twenty years ago in Germany, at the time of his brain injury, my son Karl was only on the cusp of three, but the boy could talk. Like, boy could that boy talk. Karl’s language skills in both German and English were well-beyond his few years, and I am self-aware enough to recognize that I was therefore an impossible mother to be around. For example, my son could instinctively tell whether he was sp...

Below is a mashup of some musings I’ve shared in blog, book, sermon, and presentation form about the martyred Danish Lutheran playwright, poet, and preacher Kaj Munk. Needless to say, he’s a hero of mine. It’s he, as a matter of fact, who is the source of the moniker for this Substack place and podcast, “Never the Chameleon.” Given that, and that today we celebrate Christ the King, and that we are...

This was the last of three sermons I preached last summer, all offered at the same congregation while their pastor was away.  The texts were based on Proper 23, Year B, and can be found here . The texts include 2 Kings 4:42-44, which tells of Elisha feeding 100 people with little food; Psalm 145:10-19, which tells of God’s constancy; Ephesians 3:14-21, which tells of the fullness of Christ’s love...

This sermon, preached first on July 21, 2024, continues using these texts from Proper 11, Year B: Jeremiah 23:1-6, which offers God’s dire warning to the shepherds tasked with caring for and protecting their sheep; Psalm 23, which promises God’s steadfastness both through the threat of death and beyond it; Ephesians 2:11-22, which celebrates the unity of all humanity in God; and Mark 6:3-34, 53-56...

Grace to you and peace from our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. It behooves me to begin the proclamation today by saying that Amos, and John the Baptist, and the Psalm all have words to offer us after the apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life. We may well have core disagreements with our leaders, and they may even be faithful and righteous objections. But the way to steward th...

In this somewhat ornery blog , I asserted that rostered leaders have been millstoned by systems and structures of the Church, ones which inhibit them from doing the very work they were called, by the Church no less, to do. The work in mind, here, is the center of our calling, no millstone but the cornerstone of that which leaders of the church are to be about, namely to preach and teach the Word....

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Since the election results became clear, I have not been able to get Joel 2:12-17 out of my mind. “Yet even now [Just that phrase alone, people, wells my eyes], return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and rel...