Today is “Trinity Sunday” on our church calendar – a day many pastors dread, because explaining the Trinity is so darn difficult. Don’t believe me? You try it. How do you explain that God is Father, Son, *and* Holy Ghost – all at the same time? Yes, yes – I know the analogies and metaphors […]
Today is Pentecost Sunday. Today we remember when the Holy Spirit arrived; but instead of calling it “Holy Spirit Day,” we call it “Pentecost” because it happened during the Jewish festival of that same name. Being a festival day, the tight streets of Jerusalem were surging with people. The disciples weren’t in the streets, though; […]
Romans 3:21-26, 5:6-11 I can no longer live in denial: before long, I’ll be leaving Andrews United Methodist Church. My leaving isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Change is good. In this case, change means accepting a call to First UMC in Sylva. As I’ve shared before, I’ve also had a clear, spiritual sense that it’s […]
Genesis 2:4-9, 18-25 You know those coming-of-age stories that are so popular in books and movies? The ones where a teenager or young adult slowly figures out who they are and what they’re meant to do? Those stories are popular because we all go through them to some degree. Sadly, most of us don’t discover […]
Genesis 1 “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…” (Genesis 1:26). What does this mean, do you think – to be made in God’s image? When I was a kid I took this pretty literally. I figured that we must look somewhat like God, and therefore God must look somewhat like […]
Isaiah 6:1-8 “Who will I send?” God asks in Isaiah 6:8. “Who will go for us?” If you translated that divine message into a marketing campaign, it might look something like this: This picture of “Uncle Sam” was painted by James Montgomery Flagg and used as part of a military recruitment campaign for the first […]
Revelation 21:1-8 The book of Revelation sometimes gets a bad rap. It’s full of visions that a guy named John received – visions about the future that are sometimes pretty strange or even scary, I’ll admit. Some of those were related to the near future of John’s first century Roman world, so they’ve already happened. […]
