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To many Jericho may appear to be just another bustling Arab town. However, a few words into its history and one becomes aware of a rich gem.  Though a well-established city today, it was only about 50 acres during the time of the Old Testament leader, Joshua, when he and the Israelites came in and…

This really is like the start of a joke: three guys walk into a bar, a New Yorker, a Korean and a Puerto Rican….and then sing the following lyrics in Latin for “America’s Got Talent”: Loving Jesus, Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world, grant us rest! This video is for…

I’ve missed you at this intersection between life and God. Friday our family had to evacuate our house. That is when Rid-A-Critter announced we probably had more like 150 bats in our attic and that we really should leave…for a while… In the meantime, this fall has been off to a frantic pace in other…

These days reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church has become a bedtime ritual. The “central revelation” behind this spiritual memoir about a minister who leaves her clerical post to fall more deeply in love with God is this: “that the call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human.” I…

One of the things I love about blogging is meeting new people. Kurt Johansen, who pastors a church in Dallas, Texas and teaches homiletics, recently wrote to say he had edited a book of two sermons by Karl Barth, and offered to put it in the mail for me. I gladly accepted. My very own autographed…

Lent is about abundance, God’s abundance.  When we abstain from certain things, be they caffeine or sweets or a compulsion to fix or control things, we make ourselves open to God’s provision. That’s the counter-intuitive, take-home point of James Alison’s reflections on Isaiah 55:1-9 and Luke 13:1-9, in the most recent issue of The Christian…

Yesterday’s post contained an untruth. Last night I went back and read a sentence that claimed a previous unfamiliarity with the reality that God can meet us everywhere, when in actuality I’ve always known intellectually that God can meet us anywhere and everywhere.  This reality has only become experientially truer in recent days, thanks to this mommy’s potty…

It has been a very full year here at this intersection between God and life, for anyone converted, unconverted or under conversion- and, I might add, the very first full year here!  Here are the highlights, looking back: In January: we finished up our Weird Jesus Sayings series with Jesus’ really weird curse of the fig…

Every year the president of a large, nationwide trucking company makes a visit to every affiliate in cities across America. It’s always a couple weeks before Christmas. One of the men who works in the warehouse told me.  He’s always smiling, but this day he exclaimed, “You need to meet our president! What I love…

Theologian Jürgen Moltmann calls the church a story-telling fellowship, as Tom Long notes in The Witness of Preaching.  The church does not tell just any old story.   The church tells “the story of Christ, and its own story with that story, because its own existence, fellowship and activity spring from that story of liberation.”  This “story-telling fellowship…continually…
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