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Within days, our eyes and ears and minds and hearts have drawn in far too much smoke and fire and blood and weeping.

Through OMG I’ve been pleased to keynote or lead workshops, across denominational lines, at the events listed below.

I have Reinhold Niebuhr on the mind these days.

Twice in the last several months I’ve had occasion to tell the tale of the time I stood in front of my late husband’s closet, charged with choosing the clothes in which he’d be buried.

Today, Economic Justice is the OMG topic du jour.

So in the wake of Newtown, tsunami waves of debate around gun control have already flooded our national conversations.

We have been waiting for weeks now to sing that very first verse: “Joy to the world, the Lord is come!”

This blog will be laced with obscenities.

So rumor had it, when I was young and svelte, that when a person ages, their metabolism slows down, and they gain weight more easily, and it takes a lot longer to work it off.

So tonight I learned that the tradition of paper advent calendars with windows that open to chocolate, or, for the more pious of us, Bible verses, started in Germany in the early 1900s.

Many years ago, my Grandma Madsen got fired from the Brookings South Dakota jail.

So I’ve already seen defiant-gauntlet-thrown-in-the-sand warnings on FB that if I want to say Merry Christmas to you even if you’re a Jew/Wiccan/Muslim/Buddhist/Agnostic, that you darn better deal with it.

I was listening, the other day, to a man on the radio who said that he advocated “Value Based Voting.”

A week ago or so a pastor friend of mine posted this text from Psalm 23, verse 6, on her Facebook page: “Your beauty and love chase after me everyday of my life.”

Today, at 10:00 p.m., South Dakota will execute a man, and another man within the next couple of weeks.

5:45 comes to me by way of pre-set coffee calling me out of bed, giving me some moments of solitary quiet before the family clamor, not to mention my own clamor, begins: the clamor for mama, for cereal, for laundry, for bills, for blogs, for groceries, for homework help, for supper, for tomorrow’s lunches, and then finally the calmer clamor of bedtime stories and then, perhaps by a fire, with a glass of wine as the day turns dark.

“How is the Holy Spirit found in everyday life?”

Below is the text of August 12th’s sermon for Springdale Lutheran.  The texts are below the sermon, and were captured at http://bible.oremus.org.

This blog is a posted version of the sermon I preached this morning at Springdale Lutheran, and in light of the events in Colorado, and in light of the day-to-day lives of so many  suffering sisters and brothers in the world.