I’m a week behind on sharing my sermon podcast, but it actually seems to go with Reformation Sunday so I’m just going to run with that. Last weekend, I preached on Jeremiah 31, where God says that He will write a new covenant into the hearts of His people. What caught my eye though was several verses before that when God says, “I will sow the house of Judah with the seed of humanity.” It’s a phrase that seems like... Read more
The Despised Ones are doing a synchroblog on leadership. I hate the idea of leadership. I hate the way that my evangelical world has created celebrity cults around various leaders. I was going to write a post on how there should be no leaders in Christian community but we should all consider ourselves servants with different roles. And I definitely believe that to be true. But it’s also dishonest to deny that I’m a leader. I’m a leader because people... Read more
At our church staff meeting today, we looked at this reading from Matthew 11:25-30: At that time Jesus said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except... Read more
Maybe you haven’t heard of John MacArthur. He hosted a conference recently called Strange Fire in which he accused charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity of “blasphemy of the Holy Spirit,” the only unforgivable sin according to Jesus in Mark 3:29. It’s a pretty tremendous accusation to make against half a billion Christians. This has caused quite a stir in the evangelical blogosphere with responses from Adrian Warnock, Trevin Wax, Tim Challies, Michael Brown, Brandan Robertson, and others. So how does Jesus... Read more
I’ve contributed a guest post today at Suzannah Hartzell Paul’s blog about my strange spiritual practices. Why do I carry my iPhone around with me on my Monday sabbaths? Because it has my Hebrew lexicon and for some reason prayer works better for me in Hebrew than it does in English. Check out the post for more on how this strange phenomenon developed. Read more
Last Sunday was week two of our sermon series “By the rivers of Babylon: how to live as a people in exile.” We looked at Jeremiah 29:4-11, the contents of a letter Jeremiah sent to the Israelite exiles in Babylon. Oftentimes, the contents of this letter are read out of context to have a hopeful spirit to them. What we don’t think about is that God is telling the readers of the letter to settle down in Babylon because they... Read more
My great-grandfather Luther Weigle [pictured here] was the dean of Yale Divinity School and chair of the translation committee for the original RSV Bible. He incurred the fury of the fundamentalists when he chose to translate the Hebrew word almah in Isaiah 7:14 as “young woman” instead of “virgin.” They actually burned RSV Bibles and sent the ashes to him in the mail. The reason? Isaiah 7:14 is referenced by Matthew’s gospel as an explanation for Jesus’ virgin birth. But... Read more
For the month of October, our LifeSign service at Burke United Methodist Church is journeying through a sermon series “By the rivers of Babylon: how to live as a people in exile.” My first sermon on October 6th looked at Psalm 137. Here is the audio podcast with some additional commentary below: (more…) Read more
I got an email yesterday from a church member that made my heart swell and she gave me permission to share it on my blog. I had preached this past weekend about Jeremiah’s call in Jeremiah 29 for his people to “seek the welfare of the city to which they had been sent.” What I said was that in addition to contributing to the various campaigns and efforts to stop poverty, we need to make the world personal for the... Read more
I’m at the semiannual Five Talent Academy gathering. It’s an initiative of the Virginia Methodist conference among churches who have covenanted around a set of goals for congregational vitality. Our topic today is worship, led by Rev. Dr. Constance Cherry. I’m seeing a lot of intersection between what is being said here and a book I just started reading by Andy Crouch called Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power. And it put a metaphor in my head for thinking... Read more
Mercy Not Sacrifice
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