Stay Salty

February 16, 2020

One of the many privileges of being a Pastor is that I get to hang out and work with leaders from other faith traditions. Rabbi Ariana Katz, the leader of Hinenu, a social justice Shtibel here in Baltimore, is one of my new interfaith, LGBTQ+ friends. I sat down with Rabbi Ariana at […]

Finding Ourselves Blessed

February 9, 2020

The challenge and the gift of our religious tradition is to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul and all your strength,” and to “love our neighbor as ourselves.” What a simple, clean-cut, neat and tidy guide to life. The only problem is, how many […]

Actually Good News

January 26, 2020

Somehow, we each ended up here, sitting in a church. I love to ask folks “You could be anywhere on Sunday Mornings. You could be reading The New York Times and enjoying a leisurely brunch. Why Church?” It’s an honest question, one that usually gets pretty interesting answers. What is it that we are […]

The Gift of Elders

January 19, 2020

I want you to know that I’m not comparing myself to Moses from this story from Scripture this morning. First off, I hope I don’t complain anywhere near as much as he did about his people. I actually brag about how lucky I am to serve alongside all of you, and many of my fellow […]

Our Surprising Part

January 12, 2020

Whatever it was that John was expecting, it wasn’t this. John’s been out in the wilderness for a while by now, but nothing quite prepares him for when Jesus shows up. John is one of those characters I wish more children’s plush toys and coloring pages were made to depict. Could you imagine that play […]

Gift of the Magi

January 5, 2020

The first time I heard the Muslim call to prayer was at sunset. My seminary classmates and I were staying at Tantur, an ecumenical retreat and study center just south of Jerusalem, a few miles from the boarder wall with the Palestinian Territories, next to Bethlehem. We were on the roof of our dorm, having […]

Aggressively Prepared

December 24, 2019

Advent, the month or so leading up to Christmas Eve, is a time of getting ready, of preparing. Preparing for Jesus to come again and make this tired old world new again through love, a time for the fires of hope, peace, and joy to be built, ready to roar into life at the mere […]

How Are We Going To Do This?

December 15, 2019

I Grew up around strong women who regularly changed the world. These were powerful women who saw something they thought should happen, and did something about it. It wasn’t a question of what was easy or possible. Instead they gathered people together and asked “So, how are we going to do this?” When I was […]

Sitting in Silence

December 8, 2019

Learning to be comfortable in silence was hard for me to learn. I grew up learning the power of good storytelling from both sides of my family, and no one was particularly surprised that I met my husband through a storytelling show, called the Moth, that he hosts to this day. In Seminary and Therapy […]

Thank You, God, for this Harvest

November 24, 2019

My first seminary internship was as a farmer. Princeton Theological Seminary likes to be fancy, so our internships were called Field Education, but I don’t think when it was established in 1812, working on a farming training center north of Tokyo was exactly what Archibald Alexander, PTS’ founder, quite had in mind. And yet […]