the christian calendar on Hopelessness

To You, Present Lord—Emmanuel—the One who is with us, we confess: In hearing Your voice, we have closed our ears. In sensing Your leading, we have turned away. In feeling Your presence, we have hidden...

Lord, like the women at the tomb on the first Easter, we come out of our darkness and into your light We come out of emptiness to enter your fullness We come out of our hopelessness to find your joy...

Lord Jesus–You’ve come, are coming and will come again. Whether we know it or not, we live on the edge of Your advent every moment of every day either with anticipation or with anxiety. As if stumblin...

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.

“They will look toward the earth and see only distress, darkness, and the gloom of affliction, and they will be driven into thick darkness.” (Isa. 8:22) In The Two Towers , the second novel in Tolki...

Reflection The television series Alone follows ten individuals who are left to fend for themselves and by themselves in the wilderness. Now, these aren’t everyday individuals plucked from Main St...

There’s no night so dark the light of Christ cannot penetrate to dispel it. There’s no pit so deep the Lord cannot descend all the way to lift us out of it. There’s no obstacle so high that Jesus is n...

Burnout is the disease of our age. Time magazine had an editorial way back in the 1980s about “the burnout of just about everybody.” I concluded that the metaphor of burnout was not quite right, parti...

Good Friday, and again we are reminded to never lose hope — or at least give it the weekend.

In our secret yearnings we wait for your coming, and in our grinding despair we doubt that you will. And in this privileged place we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we and by those ...

The Holy Saturday moment: when all seems dark & grim and the only thing left to do is wait...on the Lord for tomorrow morning's hope is risen.

Ash Wednesday is full of joy...The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust.

On Holy Saturday Jesus entered into the kind of forsakenness and abandonment beyond anything any person could experience. He was not content to deal with our sin problem; his love extended into the wo...

The Greek word for Easter, pascha, means “passage.” It evokes so many different passages for us: the Israelites’ passage from slavery to freedom, our own passage from sin to forgiveness, Jesus’ passag...

A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes... and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.

In a letter to his son, J. R. R. Tolkien famously wrote, “We all long for [Eden], and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is...

The Christmas message is that there is hope for a ruined humanity--hope of pardon, hope of peace with God, hope of glory--because at the Father's will Jesus became poor, and was born in a stable s...

What, as Christians, can we say to those who face death, either their own or that of their loved ones? We certainly can give them the hope of Christ’s resurrection, if they or their loved one has trus...

Just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil an...

Pastor: Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD! O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy! All: If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could s...

In her book Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ, Fleming Rutledge tries to remind us of just how dire the circumstances were in which the scenes of Advent took place. While we often d...

Some time back I had the thought that life, the Christian life, can be looked at through the two poles of Good Friday and Easter. While, of course, we would prefer to always be living an "Easter&...

We want to avoid suffering, death, sin, ashes. But we live in a world crushed and broken and torn, a world God Himself visited to redeem. We receive his poured-out life, and being allowed the high pri...

Pastor: In this season of Advent, we celebrate that Jesus has come, and that He promises to come again! When He comes, He will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the ...

In this season of Advent, may you go forth as a person of hope. May your waiting be active, that you might discover the presence of the God who is making all things new. And may the love of God, the ...

When every option is available to us, we don’t actually have freedom; we tend to shut down. I experienced what sociologists call choice overload (or paralysis) and decision fatigue. If you’ve ever tri...

Since failure is our unforgivable sin, we are willing to ignore all forms of deviance in people if they just achieve the success symbols which we worship.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and eve...

Reflection Sister Helen Prejean’s 1993 book Dead Man Walking , adapted into a 1995 film starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, tells the story of her work with two convicted killers on death row. Sh...

There are so many things we do not understand⁠ So many ways we long for change and closure⁠ Help us to trust you⁠ even when the situation is desperate and out of control⁠ Help us to follow you⁠ even...