A Positively Poetic Priest

Easter Sunday Alleluia! Christ is Risen! The Lord is Risen indeed! Alleluia! The end is just the beginning. The gospel passage we hear this morning is the end of the oldest version of the gospel of Mark.  If you happened to pull out a Bible right now, you'd probably find two other endings, passages which try to give the gospel of Mark a conclusion and add on additional stories, those two other endings have been added on through the years because people felt that this ending was somehow unsatisfactory or unfinished. It is unfinished. The end of Mark is deliberately open-ended. Obviously, the women did eventually tell their story  or else it would have never been written down. But the hearers of this story are supposed to finish the story themselves.  The end of this story, the women finding an angel in the tomb instead of Jesus is really just the beginning of a long amazing story which shares what happens after Jesus' ...

Easter Sunday Sermon Stone Three years ago this May, I spent three weeks traveling and studying in the Holy Land. Every day was packed full with visiting places throughout Israel, my classmates and I had adventures to the tune of singing Christmas carols in the caves where Jesus may have been born in Bethlehem, drinking from Jacob’s well where Jesus talked with the Syrophoenician woman, swimming in the Sea of Galilee, renewing our baptismal vows in the Jordan River, taking time to walk across the barren hills of the Judean wilderness, and walking the stations of the Via Dolorosa, the way through Jerusalem Jesus is believed to have walked on the way to his crucifixion. On one of our action packed days we experienced an unplanned stop at the border wall separating the Israelis and the Palestinians. The guards went through our tour bus, checking all of our passports, asking a few of the group to get out and check through personal items. We waited there for a while, with the ...