HOW GOES THE JOURNEY?
Lent is a quiet meditative season. For the Christian, it takes you on a slow journey between death and life. I hear that you will be studying on Wednesday evenings the events between Palm Sunday and Easter and reflect on their meaning.Continue Reading
How Good, Lord, To Be Here
I am humbled to be with you today as a lay preacher of the NC Synod of the ELCA. Today is the first time I have preached outside of my home community and I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts will be acceptable to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.Continue Reading
JESUS PRAYS
It is early in the morning. Jesus has gone off to a secluded place to pray. Yesterday had been a difficult and tiring day. Jesus had just started his ministry when he went with Peter and the other disciples to heal Peter’s mother-in-law. When word spread of the healing her home was filled with people who were sick and desired to be healed. Jesus healed folk well into the night.Continue Reading
We are all possessed.
We all have demons.
We just don’t call them demons anymore. Where the authors of the gospels, in first-century Palestine, would apply the description of “demons” to someone with an illness they didn’t understand, we might say that someone has epilepsy, or multiple sclerosis.Continue Reading
For those of you who don’t know, I’ve not always been an American. I grew up in western Canada and came to the USA when I went to seminary at Moravian Seminary in 1995. So I lived the first 22 years of my life in Canada and have lived the second 22 years of my life in the USA. I only became an American citizen about 4 years ago. Continue Reading
Last week, our Bible reading was about Jesus coming to John the Baptizer to be baptized. This was the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. After his baptism, Jesus went into the wilderness where he fasted, prayed, and was tempted by the devil. Now today’s verses from the Holy Scripture are from the Gospel of Saint John. They speak about what it was like when John and his disciples met up with Jesus along the road.Continue Reading
How do you open a Christmas present?Continue Reading
Words matter. In our culture, where words are cheap, or not to be weighed carefully, or that are seized upon as evidence of ideological wrongness, words matter. We know because God created everything, us included, by simply speaking. In Genesis 1 and clearly in the background/foreground of John 1, God creates the universe(s) by simply speaking. “Let it be.” And it comes to be.Continue Reading
Mary’s time had come. After the long journey, the road to Bethlehem, and the days of worry before that – what would Joseph say when he found out she was pregnant? How did this happen anyway? But Joseph had stood by her, and now the time had finally come, in a strange city, with no family there to help, and the barn would have to do. There was no room in the inn, but how could they have afforded that anyway? Money was hard to come by. The baby at last was coming, and Mary was terrified.Continue Reading
Here I Am
Mary was not expecting visitors, and she certainly was not expecting a visit from the Angel Gabriel. But there he was, with the afterglow of divine light fresh on his robes standing before her. “Greetings, favored one. The Lord is with you!” Not your typical greeting. Who says stuff like that? Is he trying to impress someone? Mary is a nobody, in a village filled with nobodies, no need to waste grand angelic pronouncements on her. Gabriel’s presence is more than enough to impress.Continue Reading