(Lectionary for May 6, 2018) My denomination, the United Methodists, has been wracked by dissension for 45 years over questions of sexuality. As a result of our struggle, LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters have been attacked and demeaned as lesser persons, not worthy to be full members of the people called Methodist, and not able to be ordained as our clergy. In our 1972 Book of Discipline, the official repository of the faith and polity of our church, there first appeared... Read more

Nature offers to us one of its most majestic sites when it presents a waterfall. There is something magical about watching water tumble over a cliff and descend thunderingly into a gorge, creating a crack of sound that often deafens, or at least shuts us up with conviction. The grand image of the poet of Psalm 42:7 springs to mind: “Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts; all your waves and your billows have gone over me.”... Read more

(Lectionary of April 29, 2018) This great story of the Ethiopian eunuch has presented fodder for preachers for two millenia, and its superb telling may lead any homiletician in multiple directions— but, I hasten to add, not multiple directions during one Sunday’s preaching event. The fact that the main subject of the tale is a foreign eunuch, a physical condition expressly denying him access to the Jerusalem Temple, according to clear ancient law, but a law apparently now rejected in... Read more

Well, of course, I am already ON the earth, as are you, so why should I need to go “to” it? By using this odd locution, I am suggesting that each one of us needs to shift our orientation away from merely living on our planet to connecting ourselves to it in a particular and brand new way. In this way we will celebrate Earth Day, 2018 so as to make every day earth day, for that is what we... Read more

(lectionary for April 22, 2018) Whenever the collectors of the lectionary send us Hebrew Bible types off to Acts for the weeks leading up to Pentecost, I am always astonished just how many ideas and themes of emerging and contemporary Christianity are to be found in its pages—both for good and ill. Last week I addressed that terrible and horrific overt anti-Judaism that Peter espouses in his sermon of Acts 2 and after his healing of the lame man at... Read more

In May, 2012, my wife and I took a trip to Spain, beckoned there by a long-time preacher friend who had lived in Madrid for some years. After spending time with her and her family, we rented a car and drove some 1500 miles through the south of the country. It was a magnificent tour, filled with numerous sites worthy of far more time than we had to give. However, I think for me Cordoba was my favorite, and that... Read more

(Lectionary for April 15, 2018) Whenever I enter the world of the New Testament, my Hebrew Bible antennae begin to quiver, and I look with the greatest care at the ways in which the characters of the tales think about and use the material I love from the earlier testament. Acts 3 sets my radar buzzing, and not in a good way. That infamous sermon that Peter gives in Acts 2, wherein he excoriates his Jewish listeners for their murder... Read more

Since I was not born until 1946, and in Indiana rather than Germany, my trip today is of course primarily one of the imagination. I have long been a serious student of Germany in the years leading up to, and during, the horrors of Adolf Hitler. I have read nearly every biography of that monstrous fanatic, seen countless movies and documentaries about him and his time, and thought long and hard about the mysterious “why” of his rise and collapse.... Read more

(Lectionary for April 8, 2018) The Gospel of Luke is particularly concerned with the presence of the rich and the poor. One example: in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew speaks of those who are “poor in spirit” (perhaps, “those who know of their spiritual needs”), for to them belongs the “realm of heaven,” while in Luke’s version, spoken he says on a plain, Jesus says, “Blessed are you who are poor,” period. They also possess the “realm of heaven,”... Read more

During my first trip to Israel and Jordan, now 40 years ago in January, 1978, our small pilgrimage group from Ft. Worth, Texas, visited many of the traditional sites that such tours have long viewed. We went to the Sea of Galilee and its Church of the Loaves and Fishes and the Mountain of the Beatitudes. Moving south, we went to the Old City of Jerusalem, walking the way of the cross, ending up in the Church of the Holy... Read more