“If you’re having a bad day, reading the poetry of Emily Dickinson may not be the best idea. The Belle of Amherst lived a lot of her life in isolation and was believed to suffer from severe anxiety. Her poetry is not an ode to joy but more like an ode to truth, to the way life really is sometimes. At one point, she wrote, “I lived on dread.” At another time, she said, “Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me.” For Dickinson, life isn’t really about upholding morality, but it is about mortality, death and life, life and death. This is so much a part of her psyche that she says something I would have never imagined. She says, “I felt a funeral, in my brain.” Wasn’t I right that this is not early morning reading? She’s so mortal and understands our human limitations; that’s why I’m attracted to her work.”

Lectionary Readings:
Judges 4:1-7
Psalm 123
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30

“We continue to make our lectionary march through the parables as recounted in the Gospel of Matthew, these strange stories that Jesus uses to explain the political economy of this Kingdom of Heaven of which He speaks.

The Kingdom of Heaven – the term He uses for the radical changes in human society and human behavior he exhorts his followers to join. A Kingdom, he promises, that is very near to all of them. A kingdom, He often tells those of His followers who have done something which He finds particularly exemplary, to which they are very close.

The rules and norms of this Kingdom as demonstrated by these parables must have sounded profoundly revolutionary to a poor people subjected to the heavy hand of Roman occupation and its collaborators.”

Lectionary Readings:
Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
Psalm 78:1-7
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 25:1-13

“There’s a story that during the 1948 Texas US Senate race, a group of campaign workers for Lyndon Baines Johnson found support from some new voters – who were already dead. Johnson and his aides were out one night, illegally registering voters in a cemetery, when they came upon a worn tombstone, moss had grown up around the grave; the name was barely readable. The worker at the stone took a quick look and then moved on to the next. The leader of the expedition called out: “No, no, no, go back and register that person. He has as much right to vote as anyone else in this cemetery!”

Christians believe in the communion of the Saints, a belief that says the dead who are now with God have a right to vote. Or rather they cast their vote with the way they lived. They have cast their lot with God, and in the lives of the saints we know the love of God more clearly.”

Lectionary Readings:
Revelation 7:9-177
Psalm 34:1-10, 22
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12