Seems to me that many churches today are looking more for the hype and less for the depth…are looking to “beat” their competition and keep their “consumers” satisfied…are much ado about “the show” and their “ratings.” Seems to me, that is a mistake! Jesus on the Cross...
When Jesus told Peter to put his sword away and then faced his accusers and confronted death without violence, Jesus was living out the way that the reign of God confronts evil. The resurrection of Jesus, God’s act in history to overcome the ultimate enemy—death—puts...
But you can’t prove that Easter is true by going backward, only by going forward. Because John says that’s where the risen Christ is, on the move, ahead of us, not behind us. You know what is for me the main proof of Easter? It’s you! Despite all of the setbacks and...
Christ is Risen - He is risen indeed! We are baffled by the very Easter claim we voice. Your new life fits none of our categories. We wonder and stew and argue, and add clarifying adjectives like “spiritual” and “physical.” But we remain baffled, seeking clarity and...
As someone has put it, the biblical understanding of human beings is not that they have bodies, but that they are bodies… Those who believe in the immortality of the soul believe that life after death is as natural a human function as waking after sleep. The Bible...
Lent has begun, and we need to live in this dark place between the ashes and the bread and wine, between the declaration of our mortality and the declaration of Christ’s redeeming work. Lent is a time to reckon with the reality of the darkness. We do so with hope,...
Resurrection means that the worst thing is never the last thing.
All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. Creation has a pattern of wisdom; and we dare not shield ourselves from it, or we literally will lose our soul. We can obey commandments, believe doctrines, and attend church services all our lives and still...
But the fact of the matter is that in a way it hardly matters how the body of Jesus came to be missing because in the last analysis what convinced people that he had risen from the dead was not the absence of his corpse but his living presence. And so it has been ever...