May 2021

Texts: Isaiah 6:1-8; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17 It’s Trinity Sunday again. Yay. My enthusiasm is boundless as I’m sure you can tell. But I think it’s somewhere in every minister’s job description. Once each year you will explain how God is the Trinity. And be concise please. So here we go again…    First things first. […]

‘Tis the season to be gardening, right? We just planted two young trees in our yard, an Orcas Pear and a cider apple tree. We dug deep, fertilized, and built serious hogwire fences to discourage the deer. Hopefully in a couple of years they will bear fruit. I look forward to that first fresh pear

Texts: Acts 2:1-21; Romans 8:22-27; John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15 When it comes to Pentecost, something rather rare happens for us. There’s a wonderful continuity to the flow today. All three scripture texts appointed for the day play nicely together. In John’s gospel Jesus teaches his disciples that God’s Spirit is coming as his Advocate after his post-resurrection

Last week I traveled with David to Portland to visit family on our first post-vaccination trip.  Though to be honest it still felt a bit risky.  We wore our masks in all public areas and washed our hands frequently.  But it was refreshing to make the long drive south into a slightly warmer climate, and

Texts: Acts 1:15-17, 21-26; 1 John 5:9-13; John 17:6-19 Never trust a strawberry. At least, never leave it unsupervised. A friend moved to an old farmhouse in the Skagit Valley. The house, a rental for many years now, has seen better days and has suffered somewhat from a lack of commitment to its overall health and

The news today is really good.  There’s been such amazing progress with the COVID vaccine that the CDC announced that vaccinated people may begin gathering outdoors without masks!Now, what does that mean for us? First, we will proceed with great care and concern for ourselves and our neighbors.  The virus is still here, and variants

Texts: Acts 10:44-48; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17 We’ve been reading through the Book of Acts since Easter day. It tells us how the small community of Jesus’s followers began to move from the utter disaster of the cross and grave and the mystery of the resurrection into the community we now know as the church.

Considering where we live, we are blessed. Yes we are. But are we good and faithful stewards of this blessing? Lately I’ve been thinking about how much the earth has suffered under our care. And how this suffering is a truly failure of faith. Christians have long had an outsized footprint in matters of the

I’ve heard a lot of stories about people finding the time during the pandemic to initiate home renovations. We’re a bit late to the game, but this week, spurred on by the town’s annul offer to haul off large items we decided to go for it. We went small though…in our case, it was carpet

Texts: Acts 4:5-12; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18 Some people don’t care much for the shepherd and sheep imagery of scripture. It feels so antiquated, and sometimes ends up in unctuous preciousness. We’re generations removed, most of us anyway, from actual interaction with shepherds, sheep, lambs, pastures and sheepfolds. What is a sheepfold anyway? Besides, haven’t