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. […]
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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 […]
Thirst for Freedom
The Israelites are thirsty and water is nowhere to be seen. This freedom journey out of Egypt into the wilderness has been the Lord’s idea, a trip where God has made the itinerary. And now the people of Israel find themselves camped at Rephidim with no water to drink. That’s like the first rule […]
Hunger for Freedom
Some of the prayers we know best are mealtime prayers. They are prayers which we may have learned as children and they are prayers simple enough to invite us to be children again as we pray them. As I sat with the Exodus 16 text this week – where God gives bread in the wilderness […]
Fight for Freedom
Hands are amazing. They can do so many things. They’re delicate enough to sew tiny stitches with a needle or wipe away a kid’s tears yet strong enough to hoist and hold and comfort. With our hands we can coax music out of guitar strings or piano keys and we can knead dough and we […]
Time for Freedom
Clearly, it’s time for freedom. It’s high time for freedom. The time’s up on injustice. It is time for freedom. After more than four hundred years in the bondage of slavery in Egypt, the people of Israel see a way out. And our text from Exodus 12 drops us right into the middle of one […]
Gifts of Transformation
We all want something to change. We’re all longing for something to be transformed. Maybe you want to change. Maybe you wish you’d finally reach that DuoLingo streak you keep missing by a few days. Maybe you’ll be a starter on the competitive team this year or stick to your daily yoga plan. Perhaps a […]
Geography of Faith
The other week, as Alli and I were caravanning out here, I listened straight through to all nine episodes of the WYNC Studios podcast “Dolly Parton’s America.” They powered me through our first day driving, all the way from Osage City, Kansas to Cookeville, Tennessee. It’s a brilliant podcast that explores Dolly Parton’s legacy as […]
The Path Ahead
This is not a typical sermon. At first it is not a sermon at all. I am going to start well off the subject, and even when it starts to sound like a sermon its purpose will not be fully apparent until the summary at the end. This congregation started without a pastor. We spent […]
Saying Yes
Anabaptists embrace adult baptism (or baptism at a discerning age), since this is what Jesus models and what is portrayed repeatedly throughout the Bible. For Anabaptists, baptism is a sign of faith, of readiness to be part of the church. The belief is: we aren’t born ready. This leads me back to Lydia.
God’s life with us
In the very first line of the book of Revelation, we learn that the author is in a prison colony—Patmos: a small, rugged island in the Aegean Sea. He is there as a prisoner of the Roman empire. He writes this vision as a letter to the churches back home—a theology for his friends and […]
With
Homemaking. The Christian life is a kind of homemaking. To make a home in this world, to make a life together, the routines and practices, the rituals and habits, where a people learn how to belong with one another—to find a home, not as property, not in a building, but instead with each other, a […]
Just because
Resurrection is supposed to mean a new world. Easter is supposed to mark a new beginning, a new creation, the old passing away as all things are reborn. But here are the disciples, in our passage from John’s Gospel—here they are, after the resurrected Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb, after Jesus […]
The wounds of love
I spent four hours this week in the car with Willy Wonka, Charlie Bucket, and Grandpa Joe. Leo and Julian listen to books on CD, and I recently burned an audio copy of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. How many of you have read that or seen one of the movie versions—raise your […]
Forgiveness of sins
The Easter story is so familiar to us that I think we miss the shock, perhaps even the terror, of someone coming back from the dead. Especially when, as we hear in our passage from Acts, this Jesus, back from the dead, is God’s judge. We hear that this Jesus is the one who has […]
Wounded peace
On Palm Sunday we stand at the edge of Lent, looking toward Easter. Today, with our story from Luke’s Gospel, with Jesus riding into Jerusalem, the crowds sweep us into holy week. In the story, the people line the street. The air is electric with excitement. The multitudes show up to welcome Jesus, to welcome […]
Love without calculation
In the story from John’s Gospel, they are preparing for Passover, the annual festival to remember the liberation of God’s people from slavery in Egypt. The focus of the days of commemoration are the sacrifices in the Temple. That’s why Jesus and his friends are in Jerusalem, to participate in these acts of faithfulness and […]
Prodigal God
The story centers on the impatience of the younger of the two sons. He wants his inheritance before the death of his father. I’ll read verse 12: “He said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me’” (Lk. 15:12). When the father dies, the son will get […]
Wait
Psalm 27:14, “Wait for God; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for God.” When a bible passage repeats a phrase, that’s usually a signal to pay attention. So I thought we’d pay attention to those words. “Wait for God.” This is a Psalm about waiting. Lent is a season of waiting—we gather […]