In these weeks before Christmas, we’ve been making our way through the beloved Christmas carol, Joy to the World: And heaven and nature sing Repeat the sounding joy Far as the curse is found – and today we come to And wonders of his love. It is so interesting that one of the standard favorites of the Christmas carols, was NOT written…
The story goes about a woman who was doing her last-minute Christmas shopping at a crowded mall. She was tired of fighting the crowds. She was tired of standing in lines. She was tired of fighting her way down long aisles looking for a gift that had sold out days before. Her arms were full of bulky packages when the elevator door…
Today is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of the Christian year. We celebrate that because Christ emptied himself of the authority of God and humbled himself to the point of death on a cross, God has highly exalted him and given him the name that is above every name. Therefore every knee in heaven and on earth and under the…
It began a week ago Saturday with shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson MO and the ensuing events and escalating commentary. Then there was Robin Williams’ suicide on Monday; Lauren Bacall’s death on Wednesday; Market Basket standoff ultimatums offered and ignored. And that’s just here in the United States…. And when I read the assigned Bible readings for today – I just…
At the risk of being overly confessional, have others of you noticed the unfortunate phenomenon that you get in the most fights with the people you care the most about? Melinda and I have, what I would consider, a very happy marriage. But by far I get in more fights with her than anyone else in my life. And yet she is…
Welcome, thank you! Had a great time here last year, was excited to come back. All so welcoming! This morning I want to talk about Love. This may have been obvious by my choice of readings: two famous, refulgent passages that drive the beauty of God’s love home in a way that feels like almost too much. Perhaps it is the associations…
Go, baptize, teach, remember. With such basic instructions, I wonder how church got so complicated. We have committees, ministries, task forces, councils, conferences, doctrines, dogmas. Some churches even have courts and trials to enforce it all. This structure may have something to do with how we refine and revise our processes. New procedures are usually built on what came before. When we…
So I read something quite compelling this week. A pastor, Bill Carter, suggests that the only church worth having, the only church worth belonging to, is a charismatic church. And he tells of a time when he was in a Christian bookstore. A customer learned from a sales clerk that he was a pastor. She turned to him and said, “I’m new…
A while back I ran into someone that I hadn’t seen in years. But I remembered that she’d had a birthday recently and so I said, “Happy Birthday!” Well, she was confused by this and I realized that I had crossed that invisible line that divides friends from mere acquaintances. Only good and close friends know when your birthday is. So how…
The 2013 Official Rules of Major League Baseball is a book of 240 pages in length. Maybe you would expect it to be that long, or maybe even longer. No doubt it takes a good many rules to organize a nationwide sports league – the NFL, NBA, NHL… But I wonder, the average baseball fan…