First, I want to apologize for not writing anything last week. I’m sure everyone was on pins and needles. No, really, I did want to write every day during Lent, so I’m a little behind. The website crashed last week, so my time was spent getting it back instead of adding content to it. It was an inopportune time to …
Love and Death
I’m trying to blog every day during Lent, but have already failed. So, here’s my micro-homily from Ash Wednesday instead: Ash Wednesday is, at a very basic level, the acknowledgement of our own mortality. Usually, this service is about the purgation of sin in preparation for death. But this year, we have the rare blessing that it falls on Valentine’s …
A Lenten Gift: Millstones!
I was busy all day yesterday preparing for Ash Wednesday, so I hadn’t seen the news. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent by acknowledging our own mortality and inviting us to into a 40-day journey of reflection and repentance. At the end, Jesus will die. We will call it Good Friday, so it will appear to be a celebration …
Three Things
I want to begin by thanking Adrien for leading on Sunday. It was truly a blessing to be able to sit in the pews and respond. It was especially nice to not know what was going to happen. Usually, I spend all week wrestling with a topic, so Sunday morning is merely a recitation of my thoughts and management of …
Life is a Rehearsal
In 1953, Pastor Lawrence T. Holman preached a sermon entitled, “Life is Not a Dress Rehearsal.” It’s unclear whether he came up with this phrase – it is perhaps most hilariously attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche – but it is now ubiquitous, being ideally suited to be a meme for social media. It is meant to convey a sense of urgency …
Finding Life in a Place of Death
This was the sermon from Easter Sunday: When the women go to the tomb on that Sunday morning, they are expecting to find a corpse. Because Jesus died after noon on a Friday, it was not possible to properly prepare his body for burial. The women who had followed him all the way from Galilee returned on Sunday morning to …
A Response to Charleston (preached Sunday, June 21, 2015)
I’ve been trying to figure out why the events in Charleston this week have affected me as they have. Yes, it’s a tragedy. Nine good people are gone from this world. But let’s face it: this happens every day. Every day, our news cycle is filled with death. I become immune to it just like everyone else. There might be …
Taking Up the Cross
Sorry about the cold last Sunday. Still learning about the building’s reaction to crazy Texas weather. So our conversation was brief, but good. I shared a little (maybe a lot) about the context of Romans. Paul is often read through the eyes of previous interpreters and, in our contemporary context, Romans is often the source of our ideas about what …
Suffering and Redemption
Because Lent is a time when we tend to talk a lot about sin, I endeavored on Sunday to explain my framework for thinking about sin. Some folks asked for a write-up, so here it is if you’re interested. The reason this alternative view is important is that sin, in the Christian mindset, is thought to be responsible for evil, …
My Understanding of Sin
Because Lent is a time when we tend to talk a lot about sin, I endeavored on Sunday to explain my framework for thinking about sin. It differs from things we might have heard growing up in a modern American Christian context, whether Catholic or Evangelical. In the spirit of this church’s emphasis on questioning and conversation, I am not …