One day I read a tongue-in-cheek article in The Christian Century magazine about a way churches could compete on Sundays with the Casinos. They suggested we use a lottery system for the offering. Each Sunday, one envelope would be drawn from the morning offering. That person would receive 10 times the amount of money they had donated
A few weeks back a neighbor left a dead mouse in an office supply box under our mailboxes. I wondered why anyone would do something like that or why they thought another person could cope with a dead mouse better than he or she could.
Just last Sunday we celebrated Easter with all of its joy and promise. Have you ever wished that you had been there for the grand event? The strange piece about our Biblical story is how those who first heard the good news – doubted. The gospel of Luke records that after the women went to […]
But, God’s plans are not so easily thwarted or God’s intentions defeated. On Easter God’s answer was given.
I wonder if there wasn’t a part of Jesus still hoping against hope that everything would turn out differently . . . Hoping that there would be no arrest, no cross. A wild hope that this day of celebration would usher in a new understanding of God and God’s will for the world. That somehow people would seize the moment and grasp hold of God’s vision for a world filled with justice and equity -where the hungry are fed and the homeless sheltered. A time when the sick would be healed and no child would ever die.
We come to faith in a variety of ways. There are as many ways as there are people. Through sick kids and bad marriages, colossal failures, addictions, lost jobs or in the ordinariness of our lives.
The Biblical book of Exodus contains the story of the Israelites from enslavement in Egypt through their wilderness journey. Moses encounters God in a burning bush and is told that he must go to Pharaoh in Egypt to free the Israelites who are enslaved there. God finds Moses to be a reluctant recruit. […]