Rev. Liz Goodman, Lenox & Monterey UCC

It's been forever, it seems, that we've reading old texts and interpreting them for meaning. It's a bizarre practice, one you might think we can get over. But in the age of the Twitter mob. it might be newly important.

Direct download: What_Are_We_Doing.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 6:04pm EDT

What does it matter what we believe? Nothing, if our belief never takes on matter. That's Gnosticism, and it just never seems to go away.

Direct download: Messed_Up_2.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 5:49pm EDT

I'll admit, I can't relate to the fear "all Jerusalem" had as regards the magi. But I can muster fear at the prospect of life together now playing out amidst a social context of everything thrown into question, every once clear thing now thrown into doubt. When old values, long settled, have been upset; when established truths meet with deep skepticism (and, worse, eventual cynicism): that's pretty frightening. If we come not only not to know what we long have known, but also not to know how we're to come to know what's to be known, which then comes a doubt that there is anything to be known, that's frightening--a crisis not only of authority but, more fundamentally, of epistemology.

Direct download: Epiphany_Sunday_2019--2.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 11:04am EDT

"The birth of Christ invites us into such astonishment at life's loveliness, presses upon us the distressing awareness that it could all go suddenly wrong, pushes us to the edge of all we can muster: the awe, the hope, the fear, the wonder. And by this, God calls us--the mewing cry of a newborn, which makes all else secondary to the demand of succor and love."

Direct download: Christmas_Eve.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 5:01pm EDT

This encounter between old Elizabeth, nor pregnant with John, and young Mary, now pregnant with Jesus: it's so very real. It's almost embarrassing--that it's there in scripture, that we're to talk of it in worship, bodies doing what no willpower could make them do but which they do because that's what they're made to do. women's bodies, burgeoning, bulbous and weighty, bone and brain and fluid and pain...This is so strangely,m astonishingly real."

Direct download: About_to_Get_Real.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 4:56pm EDT

"See, God's authority and human authority, though related, aren't always in accord. It's an obvious point. It's funny it's lost on Jeff Sessions. To say otherwise is to make the state equal in power and authority to the divine. And you know who really hates this sort of assertion, that the state is equal to God? Evangelical Christians..."

Direct download: The_Sessions_Verses.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 3:25pm EDT

"His power flowed out of him like that woman's power flowed out of her, and depleting as as each might have been to the host, the effect his had on his environment was as evident as the effect hers would have had, though to her shame. Her flow kept her an outcast; his flow gathered crowds--until, that is, they'd in effect have traded places, him, bleeding and ashamed on the cross and her restored to full standing in her community...I love that understanding of him--absolute presence, immediate light amidst otherwise darkness, absolute power outpouring that it might find equilibrium in the world, everyone having enough of it (though not too much) in order to be free."

Direct download: On_Power.m4a
Category:general -- posted at: 3:19pm EDT

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