Eve: Mother to All By David C. Cramer Read Genesis 1:1–5:2; Galatians 3:10-4:7 I’m 38 years old and have been in church my entire life. By my math, that means I’ve sat through close to 2,000 sermons, including approximately 38 sermons on Mother’s Day. And, yet, I can’t recall ever hearing a sermon extolling the virtue of Eve—and this despite her being called “the mother of all who live.” I’ve heard sermons preached on Eve, but they’re always on temptation, sin, and the... Read more
Earlier this year, Bible teacher Beth Moore announced that she had left the Southern Baptist Convention over the ways it elevated and defended an openly misogynistic and abusive national leader in the name of “complementarianism” (the view that men and women have different God-ordained “roles” in the church and home—and sometimes society—with men’s role being to lead and women’s role being to follow). And last month historian Beth Allison Barr published The Making of Biblical Womanhood, which examines how complementarian teaching developed in... Read more
Sara Wenger Shenk was president of Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana, from 2010 to 2019. As a course auditor and later administrative faculty member at AMBS during her tenure, I had the pleasure of gleaning from her seasoned wisdom during these years, especially from her regular chapel addresses. Sara has honed the art of breaking down complex and difficult topics and presenting them in clear and simple (but not simplistic) ways. Now that art is on display for... Read more
At Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day with a “day on.” Instead of taking the day off, we take the day to actively engage our community through activities inspired by King’s legacy. A couple years ago, I began a practice of reading one of King’s works and writing a short reflection on how it pertains to today. This year the text I chose was King’s final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? For... Read more
Isaiah 40:1–11, the prologue to the second major unit of Isaiah (chapters 40–55), is addressed to a people—indeed, to a nation—that is slowly emerging from a prolonged, painful experience of collective trauma. The first unit of Isaiah, chapters 1–39, speaks words of judgment on Judah for its sin, idolatry, and oppression. It leads up to the ultimate judgment on the people in 587 BCE, when Jerusalem is conquered and destroyed by the Babylonian Empire, and many of its people are taken... Read more
Throughout the Bible, and in the teachings of Jesus in particular, rarely do we find specific directives on political policies, platforms, and parties. Instead, Jesus and the Bible as a whole seek to expand our imaginations, to transform our minds, so that we can test and approve God’s will, that which is good, pleasing, and perfect, in our own time and place. While the responsibility falls on us to discern how to seek the peace and welfare of our society, the Bible... Read more
The parable of the talents, or of the three servants, is one of Jesus’s most familiar parables. Yet, despite its familiarity, it is one of the most commonly misread parables of Jesus. There are a number of ways to misread this parable. Some take Jesus’s description of the master in the parable to be a straightforward depiction of God. According to this view, God is a harsh master, just like the third servant describes. The Christian life, then, is about trying to meet... Read more
I don’t know about you, but for me this last week felt like it went on forever. It reminded me of the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day where TV weatherman Phil Connors gets stuck repeating the same day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, over and over and over again. It kind of felt last week like the whole country was stuck repeating the same day in Pennsylvania. Tuesday night was exciting watching returns come in and seeing states go blue or red. By Wednesday morning,... Read more
On November 1, the church celebrates All Saints’ Day, also known as All Hallows’ Day or Hallowmas. For many of us, this holiday has been overshadowed by the day that precedes it: Halloween, or All Hallows Evening, the evening before All Saints’ Day. Some traditions, such as Roman Catholicism, have a process called canonization for recognizing their holy people as saints. These are people who devoted their lives to the work of the gospel—including recently people like Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul... Read more
Recently Fr. Ed Meeks preached a sermon, “Staring into the Abyss,” which uses Catholic social teaching to provide a thinly veiled political speech against one of the two major presidential candidates, Joe Biden, in the runup to the election. The “sermon” has received over two million views and seems to be making the rounds in conservative Christian circles. I was sent it by a loved one, even though neither of us are Catholic. Below is my response. Summary You can find Fr.... Read more
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