We’ve heard of goody-two-shoes… Good riddance… Goodness gracious great balls of fire… Goodbye… Things can taste good, we like to read good books and tell good stories. We tell our children to be good and to get good grades. But what does it really mean to be good? The Random House dictionary has 41 different…
Ordinary Time
The Spirit of Healing
A few years ago, I was in Tampa for a church conference in a part of town that had a lot of homeless folks around. I have to be honest that when I saw the folks standing on the street looking for handouts, I didn’t stop to respond. I spent a lot of time diverting…
The Spirit of Patience
Patience is not a virtue that comes easily to us. Some of us are built with fairly short fuses. I think it is because we get personally invested in our work and our play and we want to see the results of our efforts. But when things start to fall apart, instead of taking the…
The Spirit of Peace
This is a vuvuzula. It is a long, narrow horn that really caught on in World Cup soccer matches a few years back. These simple horns can produce up to 120 decibels of sound when you are standing just three feet in front of them. That is as loud as a rock concert or a…
Sermon on the Mount: The Golden Rule
My sister-in-law has been staying with us all week while she completed a training here in Des Moines for her work place. It was really nice to come home in the evenings and to be with not only my husband, but both of his siblings every evening. We relaxed, had nice meals together, caught up…
The Sermon on the Mount: Lord’s Prayer Lessons
This morning in worship, we built our entire service around the Lord’s Prayer, using songs and brief meditations to help us focus on the various parts of the prayer itself. Below are the three meditations: Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven Our Father, who art in…
Sermon on the Mount: Jesus’ Version of the Law
When we head back home to Cedar Rapids, one of the things that I like to do, as long as the weather is warm, is play disc golf at Jones Park. We always start at tee 15 – in part because the parking is better there on the hilltop pavilion, and there are bathrooms handy…
Sermon on the Mount: Blessed
This morning, friends, you and I find ourselves in a season called “Ordinary Time” That is the actual liturgical name for this time in the church year: Ordinary Time. And so, last fall, we decided to spend this Ordinary Time – this season between Christmas and Epiphany on the one side and Lent on the…