What is sacrifice? Where does our faith really lie? Why is it so much easier to live in doubt and darkness, fear and fright, rather than hope and trust? These are the questions I have often asked myself in times that were good and not so good. But they were never the questions I thought […]
“Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.” I’ve spent some time this week thinking about mortality. I’m betting you have too. I haven’t been thinking about my own mortality so much as how death seems to have become a part of life in a much more cultural […]
In the name of one God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. As Jesus said to the Samaritan woman this day, we do not have to worship at Ascension to still worship together. I want to tell you a story about my dog Cuthbert, or Cutty as many of you know him. My sweet little […]
Torah is the law of God and is recorded in the first five books of the Old Testament or the Pentateuch as our Jewish friends would call it. Torah consists of 613 commandments passed down by Moses. Of the 613 commandments there are 365 negative commandments or “thou shall not” commandments and 248 positive commandments […]
There are a lot of references to forty days in the Bible. There is the flood—a time when the earth was swept clean of its unrighteousness and God promised never to do that again. Moses goes up to the mountain for forty days in order to receive the Ten Commandments. There is the Israelites wandering […]
Maria had never left the four block radius in Nashville where she had been born. Her father was a pimp and a drug dealer and her mother was an addict and prostitute. She was in her mid-twenties but wasn’t sure of her exact age. She had gone to elementary school and could read and write […]
Old age and hardship had deteriorated what was once a strong and capable body. And now her mind was following suit. The old woman still had more good days than bad when it came to her mental function, but she knew that soon that would no longer be true. She might have been, probably should […]
This Christmas the Alabama Shakespeare Festival produced The Best Christmas Pageant Ever as one of its offerings. It’s a cute play about a church Christmas pageant in which an unchurched family of juvenile delinquents—known as the Herdman children—ends up with all the lead roles—Mary, Joseph, the Wise Men, and Harold the angel (you know Harold, […]
John’s Gospel is obviously different from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Those Gospels, which we know as the Synoptic Gospels, are story-telling Gospels. They proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ by describing his life and ministry in biographical terms—Jesus went to this place, he had this experience, he interacted with this person, he said these […]