O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all ...
You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my w...
Mother’s Day is complicated for a pastor. Among the happy families that are celebrating, there are children who were abused by mothers, mothers who lost lost a child, and women suffering from inferti...
Leader: Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving-kindness; in your great compassion blot out my offenses. People: Wash me through and through from my wickedness and cleanse me from my sin. F...
Isaiah 42:14 , Hosea 11:3-4 , Deuteronomy 32:18 , John 16:21 , Luke 13:34 , Psalm 22:9-10
[Christ] gives the analogy of bitter labor and says: “A woman when she bears a child has anguish and sorrow” (John 16:21) and He applies all of this to His suffering, in which He so hard and bitterly ...
Leader: The Lord searches us and knows us. God discerns our thoughts and is acquainted with all our ways. People: Even the darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day, for darknes...
Have you really forsaken us? Why are you so far away from where we need you? Why do you not pay attention to what seems to us So alarming? Why are you so otherworldly? Day and night we have cried...
Leader: In you, O Lord, we have taken refuge; let us never be ashamed. In your righteousness, deliver us and set us free; incline your ear to us and save us. People: Be our strong rock, a fortress t...
Leader: Loving God, you know us through and through, having knit us together in our mothers’ wombs. People: We praise you for gathering us like a mother hen, for protecting us with the ferocity of a...
Job 3:1-26, Psalm 94:19, 1 Peter 5:7, Matthew 14:22-33
In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery? “The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to pre...
Just as the nine months you spent in your mother's womb were not an end in themselves but preparation for life, so this life is preparation for the next.
Revelation 1:17-18, Luke 1:38, John 1:14, Micah 5:2, Isaiah 7:14, Luke 1:45, Galatians 4:4-5
The promised Messiah, whose voice sounds like rushing waters, who holds the key to death and Hades, also grew in secret in Mary’s womb. He kicked and elbowed as all babies do, and came at the appointe...
[When you were baptized,] you died and were born in one and the same moment. This saving water was both tomb and womb. It is a strange thing, quite out of the ordinary. For indeed, at the moment of Ba...
1 Peter 5:9, Ephesians 6:13, 2 Timothy 4:7, Galatians 5:1, Hebrews 11:6, James 1:12
By illustration, I have been told that when a cow is born, she innately senses that her departure from her mother’s warm womb to a cold, scary, unknown world outside is upon her. In response, she will...
Philippians 2:5-8, Luke 2:6-7, Isaiah 53:2-3, John 13:4-5, Hebrews 2:14-17, Luke 22:27, Mark 10:42-45
Humble. Before Jesus, almost no pagan author had used “humble” as a compliment. Yet the events of Christmas point inescapably to what seems like an oxymoron: a humble God. The God who came to earth ca...
May be said responsively, alternating between leader and congregation. Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving-kindness; in your great compassion blot out my offenses. Wash me through a...
Christ is the flower of Mary, who sprouted forth from a virginal womb to spread the good odor of faith throughout the whole world, as he himself said: “I am the flower of the field, and the lily of th...
To bless generally means to speak good or to do good things for another. There are many types of blessing in Scripture. The first is the blessing God communicates to people. When God blessed Abraham b...
Philippians 2:null, 1 Corinthians 15:22, Romans 6:4, John 12:24, Luke 24:5-6, Matthew 20:28
In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to reca...
Imagine what Adam and Eve learned about God’s generosity from their first impression of him on their first day. Their first knowledge of God and the world God had made was that rest was not an afterth...
All the succession of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of light and darkness, the thousand thousands of accidents in the world, and every contingency to every one, preaches our funer...
Galatians 4:4-5, Matthew 1:23, Colossians 1:15-17, Isaiah 9:6, John 1:14, Philippians 2:6-8
By stating that Jesus is “born of woman”—this Mary (as both St. Matthew and St. Luke attest)—St. Paul insists that Jesus is most emphatically human, the “firstborn of all creation. That this Mary is a...
Isaiah 7:14, Matthew 1:23, John 1:14, Philippians 2:6-8, Hebrews 2:14, John 3:16
When he was a young boy, twelfth-century church leader Bernard of Clairvaux fell asleep outside a church while waiting to go in for a Christmas Eve service. In his sleep he had a dream, a kind of visi...
I am watching a family of black-tailed squirrels. I should be working on a Christmas message but can’t focus. They seem set on entertaining me. They scamper amid the roots of the tree north of my offi...
C.S. Lewis on the Incarnation: We catch sight of a new key principle—the power of the Higher, just in so far as it is truly Higher, to come down, the power of the greater to include the less. . . . ...
In the forward to the excellent book, Subversive Sabbath , physician and author of 24/6, Matthew Sleeth describes the process of listening to hearts as part of his medical practice. While speaking ...
We think that God is an object about which we have questions. We are curious about God. We make inquiries about God. We read books about God. We get into late-night bull sessions about God. We drop in...
Galatians 2:20, 2 Corinthians 5:17, James 2:14-17, John 3:3, Philippians 3:10, Romans 12:2
I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please. Not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep, but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk, or a snooze in the sunshine. I don’t want enough of God t...
We come into this world blissfully unaware of these fragile, beautiful things we call our bodies. In our mother’s womb, we bathe in continuous warmth and nourishment, changing shadows and muffled voic...
The Christian’s self-understanding is that she is precious before God—however much a sinner, however much a failure (or success) she may be by the standards of worldly comparisons—and that every other...