Below you'll find a list of all posts from December, 2015
Jesus is the fullness of God on stage. He is what John Donne called “Immensity cloistered in a womb.” Just when we thought the Lord God would sue for divorce, after a thousand years of our adulteries, the Lord God sends Jesus. In a world of no-fault divorce, this is astonishing grace. It was the most dramatic of moments. Angels …
The Bible’s basic story line is laid down in the Torah, the first five books. Creation is the good beginning, worked into our memories with the rhythmic repetitions, “and God saw that it was good.” The promise land is the good ending as Moses leads the people up to the border of Canaan. In between is the catastrophe of the …
The Lord God who could not be looked upon has come near to us and is visible in the person of Jesus. Jesus who seven times in the Gospel of John refers to himself as the “I am” puts the true face on the “I am” God of the Burning bush. We saw his face and we lived. In fact …
We attempt to engineer a world where sadness and despair just don’t have a place. And then one day sadness-a sense of loss- runs a red light and hits us broadside. The Christmas story tells us we are wired for relationships. So why are we shocked when memories of relationships gladden or sadden us? Relational loss accounts for a lot …
GOSSIP, SLANDER, HATE SPEECH AND FORNICATION ARE ALL PERFECTLY LEGAL– AND IMMORAL If we begin with Jesus who is the object of our faith he then shapes our speech. If we begin with our politics our politics will shape our speech. If it is humorous for a politician to trash the liberals or the conservatives then it is “my right” …
From the moment of Jesus’ conversation with a Samaritan woman right through the day Jesus died on a Cross, on through his Resurrection and Ascension and the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost, Jesus astonished us with his unpredictable goodness. As Christ’s disciples in 2015 we are now, in the world of domestic tensions and international terrorism, servants of the …
We are all very upset about the fourteen dead in California, the murders in Colorado Springs and the nine African Americans killed in a Charleston church and on and on. Murders committed by proponents of the sacred, ISIS and an end-times obsessed Christian, and by Dylaan Roof, a young man for whom nothing is sacred. The public rants and sloganeering …
Scripture says God was reconciling the world to himself through his Messiah. In Ephesians nine verbs tell us what Jesus has done and what is now real in the Church: Jesus is our peace (2:14), he made us one (vs. 14), he broke down the dividing wall of hostility (vs. 14), created one new humanity (vs. 15), made peace (vs. …
