Tuesday, March 1, 2022 The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster Zaó: The word zaó and its counterparts are scattered across the Greek New Testament. Zaó means “to live” and Jesus is constantly turning to life amid death, possibility amid impossibility. Especially in the gospel of John, we get Jesus’ promises of new life in [...]
Monday, February 28, 2022 The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster Yes: Everyday we have an opportunity to say “yes” to this life set before us. Everyday we are offered the possibility to say “yes” to God. In return, everyday God says “yes” to us (or is it God’s “yes” that comes first? probably). In [...]
Sunday, February 27, 2022 The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster Xenophilia: Love of the stranger (xenos) is core to Christian theology. In Deuteronomy, we read, “You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The command to love the stranger (also translated foreigner, sojourner, traveler, or resident alien) [...]
Saturday, February 26, 2022 The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster Within: Ours is a traveler’s faith. Yes our faith is rooted by place, look at any annotated Bible and you’ll find a map with important journey’s taken by biblical characters. But if ours was simply a place-oriented faith, how could we pray-without-ceasing or know [...]
Friday, February 25, 2022 The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster Valley: We don’t always know how to talk about grief, struggle, or pain. We don’t have vocabulary. We don’t have enough understanding. We can’t shape it into sentences. It’s raw. Unprocessed. Beyond words. For me the poets help. The ancient poetry of Psalm 23 [...]
Thursday, February 24, 2022 The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster Unnameable: I have long felt a kinship to those who are seeking to name the divine. Hagar names God El Roi, “The One Who Sees” because God saw her in her distress. God tells Moses “I am who I am,” from which we get [...]
Wednesday, February 23, 2022 The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster Transformation: I’m not sure we always seek transformation. Some of us (myself included) have days where we say to ourselves, “things are just fine the way they are, thank you very much.” We close ourselves off. We halt any intruding possibility of conversion. [...]
Tuesday, February 22, 2022 The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster Silence: I find myself struck by the practice of silence. In a way our tradition steers clear of silence. If you worship with us on Sunday mornings, we begin with a wall of sound from the organ, and then the entire service is [...]
Monday, February 21, 2022 The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster Remember: When we are invited to the communion table, we hear Jesus’ words, “Do this in remembrance of me.” We are a remembering-faith. We remember and retell the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection because (1) Jesus asked us to and (2) it [...]
Sunday, February 20, 2022 The Reverend Dr. Katie Snipes Lancaster Questions: Our faith is most dynamic, I think, when we are willing to sit with the questions. Sometimes the questions can be overwhelming. Sometimes we don’t know the answers. Sometimes not-knowing is hard (we are, I suppose, a culture of evidenced-based, well-researched knowing [...]