https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJHDNisY5u8 If you’ve been paying attention, since 1957 when Carolina won it’s first national championship with a 3 overtime win over Wilt Chamberlain’s Kansas team— in Kansas!! no team, other that John Wooden’s 1960s-70s UCLA teams has either played in as many Final Fours (20) or won as many (6). Or put a different way, in the modern era of shot clock, 3 pointers, and dunking since 1982 when Michael Jordan made THE SHOT, no team at all has won... Read more

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There is an old Polish legend about a very bad old woman who died, and as you would expect, went to Hell. The story says Hell is a great deep pit, of which you can see the top from the bottom (I don’t know—haven’t been there). The old woman didn’t like it and tried to attract the attention of angels flying above at the top. One went to see what he could do. “Have you ever done a good deed?”... Read more

The parts of the New Testament that really prove the resurrection are not Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20.21. These are the stories of the first Easter. Of course I am not depreciating them; they are of great value. But taken in themselves and on their own, they could be wrong, they could be mistaken, they could be deliberate fiction, invented to bolster up a case. The parts of the New Testament that prove the resurrection are... Read more

C.K. Barrett had a rapier sharp wit, when he chose to use it. Here is a quote that seemed appropriate for today, though Barrett is being perfectly serious (or as he would say ‘in deadly earnest’) in this quote from one of his sermons—- Humans may have descended from monkeys, but they certainly have climbed higher up the tree of life than they have. We learn of some of the things that humans have lost in the course of the... Read more

Human beings still need God as the only possible center for a stable life. They still become like the thing they worship. Paul saw humans imaging a god in the likeness of the beasts, and so coming to have the morals of the beasts, and that would do for the mild-mannered and aesthetic cult of nature today. Those who worship sunsets will acquire just about as much stability and reality as the sunset itself. Those who worship the machine will... Read more

I think we have given the sentimentalists much too free a reign to ruin half of our first Christian words and phrases. Think what they have made of love— something so feeble and sugary that a preacher hesitates to use the word. Think what they have made of patience—“a little more folding of the hands to rest” (as the Bible says about something quite different). They have had at this phrase too—“thy will be done.” Such is the state of... Read more

In Jesus we know what God is like. Half the mental suffering one meets springs from wrong ideas about God. Because they have found God in themselves, or in nature, or in philosophy, as soon as suffering comes, people develop a grudge against the universe. Their God is no bigger than themselves, and they hate him and revile him, as you may, I am told, see a savage beating his idol when things have gone wrong. But we meet another... Read more

When people demanded a sign from Jesus he refused point blank. He refused because they were asking for something incontrovertible, something by which God would compel persons to accept Jesus as his Son, his Chosen One, something that would fetter their reason and overpower their will. And God does not go in for that kind of sign. All God’s signs are open to contradiction. So it is in the Old Testament—there is nothing compulsive in Isaiah and his children with... Read more