Mercy Not Sacrifice
The pastor of Scottsdale Congregational United Church of Christ found my track “Our Father” on the Wild Goose compilation and he made this music video that he showed in his worship service. The lyrics to the song are below. (more…) Read more
The pastor of Scottsdale Congregational United Church of Christ found my track “Our Father” on the Wild Goose compilation and he made this music video that he showed in his worship service. The lyrics to the song are below. (more…) Read more
What comes to mind when you hear the phrase “weightier matters of the law”? It sounds like they would be the parts of the Bible that are hard for a modern world to accept. Evangelical Christians in our time tend to litmus-test their faith according to their loyalty to what they see as the “weightier” parts of the Bible that clash with modern sensibilities, whether it’s young Earth creationism, the eternal conscious torment of hell, a complementarian account of gender,... Read more
The title is everything if you want a well-trafficked blog post. Now my task is to explore whether this provocative statement is actually true. I spent last week reading a couple of Catholic writers offering a provocative definition of “poverty” as a positive state of character. So I thought this could be my contribution to the Despised Ones synchroblog this week on how to show genuine solidarity to marginalized people. I think that you have to become poor to live... Read more
This week’s Journey to Eternity sermon is about welcome. The word welcome is one way you could summarize God’s mission to humanity through Christ. Jesus eliminates any obstacle to our welcome at God’s heavenly feast through the sacrifice of His body on the cross. For our sermon text, I looked at Luke 19:1-10, the story of Zacchaeus, in which Zacchaeus is saved from his sins not by being chastised or argued into a corner, but through Jesus inviting himself over... Read more
Today I officiated my first wedding for Kevin Colpitts and Mary Vafiadis, a couple who was visiting our church when my wife Cheryl and I preached a sermon on our egalitarian understanding of marriage and decided they wanted me to marry them. Kevin and Mary are very grounded, beautiful people who are exploring Christian spirituality. As part of their counseling process, we practiced praying together, which is the most important part of my marriage even though we don’t do it... Read more
The brazenness of the American neo-cons in response to the military coup in Egypt continues to shock me. The latest gem is the Wall Street Journal’s declaration that “Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, who took power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy.” Pinochet a midwife of democracy? If you can make a statement like that, then how in the... Read more
David Brooks really fired me up today with this zinger about how Egypt’s turmoil proves that “Islamists… lack the mental equipment to govern.” America’s moralistic self-justification for every time we have invaded a country of brown people (the last white country we invaded was Germany) is that we are bringing them the democracy that will save them. Except that it never works, at least not as we planned. Inevitably they elect “socialist radicals” or “religious fundamentalists” so the CIA has... Read more
As we celebrate Independence Day, I’ve been meditating on the inalienable rights that Thomas Jefferson wrote about: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” John Locke, a British philosopher who was a huge influence on the American Revolution, had coined a slightly different phrase: “life, liberty, and property.” So my first question was: why did Jefferson change the wording? (more…) Read more
This weekend I preached on the suffering servant passage in Isaiah 53. I talked about the people in our world who “bear our infirmities and carry our diseases,” comparing them to Frodo Baggins, the Hobbit who carried the ring of doom to be destroyed in the lava in Lord of the Rings. I will be in Texas for the next several days and will be taking a break from the blog, so peace be with you. Here’s the audio for... Read more
[I posted this on Red Letter Christians two years ago but the Senate’s passage yesterday of immigration reform legislation make it applicable today.] We are all illegal aliens in the kingdom of God granted entry only by the amnesty of Christ’s blood. That is the strange foundational truth of Christianity. There is nothing I can do to get a green card that will prove to God that I deserve his love. There is no line for me to wait in... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In