Do any of you have days that you aren’t proud of? I had one of them just a few months ago. It was a day where I was grumpy and snarky. I was gossipy and rude. My husband and I had a fight the day before and the disagreement still had not been resolved. The…
Kenotic Words
worship, sermons, lectionary
A Love Letter from God
Dear Church, I’m not often in the habit of writing letters. My apostle, Paul, loved to write letters and you have quite a few of those contained in the scriptures. I guess I did write seven letters some time ago – to seven different churches… but I digress…. This isn’t something I do a whole…
“Show Me” faith
A father was trying to teach his three sons to do their fair share of the house cleaning. The first place that he started was the bathroom. Dad crammed the three boys into the room and proceeded to clean the toilet in front of them. Alright, I’ve showed them, the father thought. Next time, they…
How Should We Love?
Last week, we talked about a little place on the southwest side of Jerusalem… does anyone remember what that ugly and awful place was called? Ghenna! Ghenna is a trash dump… it is a valley of garbage… it is a place for filth and waste… a place to burn and destroy the refuse of our…
Ghenna
One of my favorite things to do as the weather warms up is to get outside and play some disc golf. A week and a half ago – before winter decided to come back and pay us another visit – I was able to play my first round of the year at Jones Park in…
Salt and Light
This morning, we seem an awfully long ways from the Kingdom of God. Yesterday – eight years to the day since we sent forces to Iraq, we began bombing in Libya. Unrest in Bahrain, Yemen, and other countries in the middle east is being showed on our airwaves. Earthquakes. Tsunamis Nuclear reactors having problems. Where…
potluck worship
A colleague of mine recently forwarded an email about potlucks and banquets. It was written by Dr. Ed Robinson, the president of MidAmerica Nazarene University in Olathe, KS. photo by: Gözde Otman Dr. Robinson asks us if our worshipping experiences are more like banquets or potlucks. And by that he means: do you come to…
Come Out the Wilderness
As we started this journey of Lent yesterday with Matthew, we entered the place of wilderness and watched as Jesus wrestled verbally with the devil. It was a rich dialogue of temptation and power and scripture… with some magical teleportation thrown in there for good measure. But as Keith Mcilwain reminds us, the devil is…