The Holy Spirit calls us in many ways: through our thoughts to follow him, to address this issue or that, to allow him to heal us, through our dreams, a friend’s suggestion of a movie to see. An idea heard two or three times in as many days. An invitation to see or hear with […]

Jesus was drawn to the poor, the lame, the blind, the rejected of society, and the non-Jews like the Roman Centurion and the Samaritan. He spent time with the Pharisees and Scribes, the elite of the Jews. He was interested in what they wanted. If someone asked for healing for themselves or their servant or […]

  Paul defines the church of Jesus Christ as one body, the one church of Jesus Christ, and like the body the church is made up of different organs and parts which function in interdependence on, and with, each other.[1 Cor. 12:12-27, Romans 12:4-5, Ephesians 3:6, Colossians 1:18, 24] Interestingly, Paul’s metaphor for the church […]

  We human beings begin in Genesis 1:27, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Every man or woman, of every race, or every ethnicity, of every area of the world, be they able-bodied or disabled, be they smart or […]

  When my friend Don asked me recently at lunch how I was doing, I laced the fingers of my two hands together and said, “the left hand represents my mind; the right, God’s mind. I am somewhere between these two, depending on who I am listening to right now. The more I listen to […]

At the end of the Deuteronomy, in Books 28, 29 and 30, just before the Israelites are to cross the River Jordan into the Promised Land, God is laying out for the Israelites how they are to live there. Deuteronomy 28 details the results of their choices in life: if they choose to follow God, […]

We would call him a wastrel or spendthrift or a lazy man or squanderer, but Jesus called him the lost[NIV] or prodigal[NRSV or MSG] son in His parable. In some ways we all feel like that lost son(or daughter) who has “spent” our inheritance from God in bad ways; we are undeserving of God’s love […]

Christianity is a lay-driven movement, not a preacher-driven one. Each of us is to have a personal relationship with Christ, a deep knowledge of the Bible gained through Bible study, an ability to hear and follow God’s Indwelling Spirit, a body of experience of who God is in our own lives, knowledge of our own […]

  “Lent leads us to the cross,” preached Rev. John Cleghorn at our church on the first Sunday in Lent. The question for us is this: is it the cross of Jesus or our own cross that Lent leads us to? Of course, the whole passion story leads us to Jesus’ death on the cross […]

If English had a better neutral pronoun, I would use it instead of “he” for God. As it is, neither pronoun, “he” or “it,” begins to describe who God is or what God is about. God the Father is such a common image that we have of God—it speaks to the relationship that God wants […]