If We Open Up Our Hands
Over the last ten weeks, we journeyed through our sermon series together, “Unraveled: Seeking God When Our Plans Fall Apart.” We have walked alongside Jewish refugees in Babylon, the apostle Paul, the gathered church on Pentecost, the suffering and faithful Job, the Samaritan woman at the well, and many others. We began this series partway […]
Dismantling Pharaoh’s Systems, One Brick at a Time
Please note, footnotes do not transfer into the HTML versions of our sermons. Please refer to the PDF copies below for all citations. Because of policies of Pharaoh, Hebrew boys were more at risk than their Egyptian counterparts. Like every social inequality, if you want to understand how this came to be, you have to […]
The Humor of our Situation
Please note: We discovered recently that footnotes do not carry over from our some of of our word processors into the HTML (text) publications of our sermons. Until we rectify this situation, please refer to all pdf copies of sermon for full attributions. As part of our training, many Presbyterian clergy have to complete a […]
Ready to Relate
The “Jesus was a feminist who liberated women from misogynistic Judaism” school of interpretation has become so mainstream that it’s tough to engage this text today as it is instead of as we’ve heard it to be. Chances are you’ve heard that school of interpretation so often that it doesn’t even seem like interpretation anymore. […]
Needful Facts
Here we are, again. The Israelites are back to wandering through the Near East, this time as prisoners of war in exile. The Babylonian Empire ransacked Jerusalem and took the Israelites with them back to their capitol, Babylon. This was a common practice in ancient empires as it allowed their leaders to exercise control of […]
Exorcism in America
Unclean spirits and demons were a real problem in the 1st century. Though you could not see those dastardly demons, they had terrible, tangible effects. They took over a person’s identity, disconnecting them from their true self, defacing the goodness that is at the core of every human being. So powerful were these demons that […]
This is Us. This is America. This is Pentecost.
Pentecost is here–the one Sunday a year when the Church lets the Holy Spirit out of the closet to join the rest of the Trinity. The Sunday that is sometimes referred to as “the birthday of the church,” because it is the day we celebrate the arrival of the Holy Spirit and the anointing of […]
Stepping Out
There Peter is with his fellow disciples on the sea, their tiny boat tossed back and forth, tortured by the waves, the wind howling all around them – and Peter wants to get out of the boat. “Lord, if it’s you, command me to come to you on the water.” This isn’t Jesus’ idea. He […]
Unlikely Conversions
Nobody wants a God who can come into your life at any moment and flip you upside down. It doesn’t matter whether you are liberal, conservative, whatever gender, whatever race, whatever age – we prefer a God who settles down the chaos of our lives, not stirs it all up. I bet there are more […]
Love in Public
Phyllis Trible, feminist biblical scholar, says that “the Bible is a pilgrim wandering through history to merge past and present.” I’d venture to say that we, too, are pilgrims wandering trying to merge the past of this biblical text with our current time and place. So when we are confronted with the ugliness of the […]