In today’s gospel reading from the Book of John, Jesus prays to God to protect his disciples, his dear friends: “I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours…And now I am no longer in the […]
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The Powerful Name
It is gift to see each of you here today. My name is Ben, I’m the pastor of Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship. Raleigh Mennonite – thank you for joining us today! Thanks to pastor Melissa and everyone that collaborated today in this service. This is the third week after Easter that I will be preaching […]
Witnesses to the Resurrection
When I was a college student at Bethel College in Kansas we had to go a certain number of these mandatory convocation lectures. One Monday mid-morning in the spring of 2012, I was a lanky freshman sitting slouched into an uncomfortable auditorium seat. Gregory Ellison II, a young professor from Emory’s Candler School of Theology […]
Community of Resurrection
For the next few weeks in this Easter season, I am going to be preaching from the book of Acts, focusing on the impact of Jesus’ resurrection for the community of the church. Our short passage from Acts for today is a beloved one. Over the centuries folks from monks in monasteries to Anabaptists farming […]
Back to the Beginning
One of our practices as a community is to carve out space in our shared worship to share with one another where we’ve sensed the Divine. We wonder where God whispers in words and stories and in the pauses and punctuation and spaces between the lines of scripture. And, maybe some of you in the […]
We Wish to See Jesus
Where we are looking says a lot about what we’re looking for. If we took in all of the available data – all the sounds and sights and smells around us – we would be overwhelmed with the noisy blur around us. So we screen and select, sharpening our attention in particular ways. Sometimes this […]
For God So Loved
Life begins with love. For God so LOVED. From the beginning of time and light and far-flung spinning galaxies billions of years in the making to the beginning of each you – life begins with love. For God so loved the world. To be alive is a gift, never to be taken lightly – […]
Zeal for Your House
When Jesus entered the Temple in Jerusalem it was raucous as always – a cacophony of sound – prayers and song, animals bleating, different languages blending into one holy din. Maybe the smell of incense and burning wood and roasting animal flesh wafting upwards hit Jesus’ nose first. Tens of thousands of people were gathering […]
The Weirdness of God
Abraham “fell on his face” (17:3, 17). That is our story tonight in Genesis. We are dipping into the era of the patriarchs and matriarchs. Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph. Sarah and Hagar and Rebekah and Leah and Rachel. Abraham and Sarah’s story is meandering and covers no less than 15 chapters of […]
Driven into the Wilderness
My grandpa had a story that I heard him tell a few times. I can’t confirm all of its details but I can confirm its truth. Sometime when my grandpa was a teenager going to the local Christian high school, during an evangelical chapel service, he was moved to dedicate his life to God and […]
Transfiguration Sunday
Our faith is made up of a series of encounters between humans and God, humans and humans, God and God. Sometimes these encounters have ended in floods or wars or colonial oppression. Other times these encounters mean learning, sharing, and being transformed for the better. And often, the really monumental encounters, the ones whose stories […]
Gathered at the Door
I really appreciate the invitation from you all to be here as a guest preacher. It’s a bit odd to be asked to speak…usually everyone else is doing the talking – rushing by loudly on the street outside or they come and push me open without even thinking. My life is pretty solitary but the benefit […]
Power Belongs to God
God is speaking good news all around us. Which is why listening is so important to the life of faith…listening to God… and listening to those God might be speaking through. Our Psalmist for today is a listener: “Once God has spoken; twice have I heard this: that power belongs to God, and steadfast love […]
Search Me & Know Me
We’re all searching for something. When I ride my bike I love to search for random items strewn on the roadside. I’ve found lots of things this way. I’ve found a little pocket knife that’s now a favorite, a few nice pairs of gloves, lots of bungee cords, and sometimes cash. To a lover of […]
Beginning as Beloved
Today is the celebration of Christ’s baptism. And yesterday in the church calendar was Epiphany, remembering the three wise men from the east who journeyed to offer gifts and see the Messiah. It’s the time in the church year when we celebrate Jesus bursting onto the scene of the world’s drama – making himself known […]
Magnifying the Mighty One
Each year in December the music streaming platform Spotify sends each account their Spotify Wrapped year-end report to click through. It’s exciting to get the news of the number of hours you listened to music in the past year, what your top artists and albums and most played songs were, and for which groups you […]
Wilderness Preparations
There are all sorts of ways that Mark could have begun to tell the story of the good news of Jesus. Each of the four gospels has its own take – Matthew begins the story with a genealogy, Luke with an epic history of unexpected births, and John with a cosmic meditation on the word […]
Waiting and Not Knowing
The Christian year turns on the axis of waiting and hoping in God. On this first Sunday of Advent, we as the church begin again by taking a posture of persistent waiting. In Advent we insist that darkness is not a place of God’s absence but the damp soil where roots of holy hope grow. […]
Lord, when did we see you?
I was jaded and cynical about academics by the time I finished high school. So the year after graduation I found myself in Albuquerque, New Mexico with Service Adventure, a Mennonite Mission Network program, living with a few other young adults all trying to live out our faith in tangible, hands-on ways. My day began […]
The Peaceable Kingdom
As modern people it’s easy to buy into the illusion that we are so evolved, cultured; more advanced than we were even a couple decades ago, much less a couple centuries ago. We are a forward-looking culture who would rather yield power to the cleverness of the young than confess our mistakes and learn from […]
What are we waiting for?
What are we waiting for? I sit in front of my glowing computer screen waiting and hoping that some word from God would be present in my heart and on my fingers as they type. I look out the window by my desk and see a bird perched on an empty feeder, waiting for me to […]
Students of the Living God
Good teachers take us from where we are, to a place we couldn’t even quite imagine before we began the journey of learning. Sometimes the choice to be a learner, to be a student, isn’t something we consciously make. Imagine a young baby swimming in the sea of noise and human language from which meaning […]
Many are called
This past week I was on a walk with my wife Alli in the dusk of early evening. We were catching up after a day of work. As we walked on a quiet sidewalk, there sat a masked skeleton in a chair. Even though I knew it was fake and plastic… I tensed up, raised […]
A Call to Action
Prayer: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” In an earlier sermon I opened with a few comments about the Lectionary, and do so again. Today it lists three scripture passages that are hard to ignore. Who can brush aside […]