Growing up during the Cold War Era in a family proud of its Eastern European heritage and belonging to an ethnic Eastern European church, there was a story I heard periodically around Easter time. The story made its way into sermons and was sometimes repeated in family gatherings. As the… Read More »Making Sense of the Resurrection of Jesus Today
The cycle is all around us. Life, death, and new life characterize existence as we know it. Perhaps by being more attentive to this cycle we can learn to flow with the changing rhythms of life and embrace life’s richness in each moment. The following is a text version of… Read More »Cycles of Living, Dying, and Rising
Crucifixion: truly a brutal, violent way to kill another human being. A person hangs naked on a cross with lungs filling with fluid, struggling to breathe, and then succumbing after hours of struggle to the inevitable last gasp and death. All the while, one’s suffering is a public spectacle. Such… Read More »Making Sense of the Crucifixion of Jesus
Extravagance: that’s not something we usually associate with Lent. Yet, extravagance is key to understanding the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. To be extravagant, to be lavish, to be imprudent, to be over the top and do something no one else would do — yes, these are all key… Read More »The Extravagance of Lent
Friendship. The term is used frequently and conveys a myriad of meanings. On social media, we “friend” others including people we’ve never met. We refer to people we haven’t seen in years, perhaps since school days, as “friends” yet other than sharing a moment in time, we have little in… Read More »The Way of Jesus in Friendship and Grief
It’s an age-old question … one that people continue to ask. Why is this happening? Things happen to us that we view as bad. We look for a reason. We ask these questions when we don’t get the job we want, when a relationship doesn’t work out, or when a… Read More »Jesus, God’s Glory, and the Law of Attraction
It’s an ancient tradition. Over the last 1500 years or so, Christians have observed a period of prayer and fasting prior to Easter. In time, a forty-day period (Sundays aren’t included because Sundays are a memorial of Easter) emerged within the Christian tradition and came to be called Lent. The… Read More »Lent and the God of Jesus
WWJD? What Would Jesus Do? How about this? What would Jesus want us to do? Anyone who seriously reads the New Testament gospels will be uncomfortable when they realize what Jesus actually wants from his followers. The following is a text version of this posting. Some years ago, there was… Read More »What Would Jesus Want?