2nd Sunday of Advent – Street Psalms

A Loud Invitation

By Rev. Sarah Wiles | December 2, 2022 |

I love the lead up to Christmas. It’s this cozy, warm season. But just as I get settled in, John the Baptist shows up yelling.

Change! You better change! Change it all!!

Prepare the Way

By Rev. Sarah Wiles | December 3, 2021 |

Anytime we read something like, the word of the God came to so-and-so, I’m tempted to imagine this happened in some alternate spiritual universe—one where there are prophets and visions and miracles—not my ordinary everyday world. But the author of Luke is at pains to tell us that this happened here, in the real world, at a specific time in a specific place.

On the Edges

By Jessica Louwerse | December 4, 2020 |

Wilderness. Uncultivated. Uninhabited. Inhospitable. Neglected. Abandoned. Disfavored. Dangerous. These words are commonly used to describe places of “wilderness.” And yet, as I write, my eye keeps catching the edge of…

Born in Wilderness

By Ojii BaBa Madi | December 6, 2019 |

For Karen, the stairwell was her wilderness sanctuary, right in the heart of the merciless city. There, she found the space and solace to let loose and cry out with a loud voice. The oppressive thumb of drug addiction, abuse, pain and poverty could not find her in that place.

The Waiting Rooms of Christmas: The Wilderness

By Ojii BaBa Madi | December 7, 2018 |

A smartly dressed, well-heeled crowd pressed their way through a cold December evening in 1851, seeking to find comfortable seats within the warm confines of New York’s Metropolitan Hall. The hype for this event was incredible. It would become part of an annual phenomenon, featuring big and plenteous voices, gathered to sing out the scriptures, as arranged by George Frideric Handel in his oratorio, “The Messiah.”

Awake in the Water

By Ken Sikes | December 8, 2017 |

We would have called it the boonies or the sticks or perhaps BFE. Mark refers to it simply as the wilderness. Whatever the name, it was a place you didn’t so much go to as you went through.

The Four Waiting Rooms of Christmas – Wilderness

By Kris Rocke | December 2, 2016 |

This year during Advent the Gospel of Matthew invites us to sit in, what we are calling, The Waiting Rooms of Christmas: Apocalypse, Wilderness, Prison and Public Disgrace. These strange…

BEEP BEEP BEEP Arggg

By Scott Dewey | December 5, 2014 |

In Mark we get a smelly guy yelling – dressed like a nutcase. Right from the opening verses. “Repent!” Literally, “get a different mind!” Wake up!