“Everything happens for a reason.” That is the title of a book by Kate Bowler, a professor of history at Duke Divinity. Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved) came out this week and I, like many others, heard her interviewed on NPR. I know that Kate happens to be a friend […]
Misunderstanding Jesus
This is a risky conversation, here at Jacob’s well in the land of Samaria: Jesus, a Jew, and this woman, a Samaritan. Jews and Samaritans are kindred peoples, distant relatives, both tracing their lineage to Jacob, the patriarch of Israel. Samaritans and Jews are cousins, but they are not friends. There is tension between the […]
Fierce love
Jesus is a Jew, part of God’s people. And as a faithful Jew, he takes a trip to the temple in Jerusalem for Passover, the festival that remembers Israel slavery in Egypt, and God’s salvation, God’s liberation, freedom from the shackles of bondage, their forced labor, their economic exploitation. When he arrives in Jerusalem, walking […]
Unseen revelations
Last week we read the opening scene in John’s Gospel. A man named Philip found his friend, Nathanael, and told him about a rabbi, a new one who was passing through town, an itinerant rabbi. This was not unusual in first century Judaism—rabbis would emerge, their ministry gaining a following, then perhaps fizzle out. If […]
Consent
In the beginning the earth was without form. In the beginning the darkness roamed and did not hide. The darkness covered. The darkness ruled. In the beginning, there was no light. In the beginning hope was formed with a breath that declared, “Let there be.” And in response to her own voice the earth shifted and moved, and God said “Yes, this is good.”
Hope made flesh
This is the third week where the prophets have taken us to Israel in exile, the Jews in Babylon, God’s people surviving in the midst of their oppressors—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and now Daniel. In these Scriptures, the prophets offer words of survival, guidance on how to go on, now that they are forced to live as […]
Gardens
The Jeremiah writes a letter, a prophesy, to his people in exile, deported to Babylon, living among their enemies—a letter as guidance on how to survive. “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles… ‘Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce’ ” (Jeremiah […]
Unto Us: A Child
This week I listened to the radio while driving around on the highway, as I often do these days, sipping my coffee and seeing how long I can tolerate to drone of the regurgitated news cycle before I have to resort to more interesting podcasts, or give up all together for another episode of Two […]
The Lord roars
For the past several weeks, the passages have focused us on specific people, characters in the story of the Bible, individuals in leadership roles in Israel—people like Samuel and David and Elijah, and we heard their stories as ways to think about our own lives. There’s a shift that happens today. For the next month […]
I alone am left
I can’t read this story and not be transported back three years ago to August 8, 2014. It had been three weeks since Kaitlin and I had moved to Erbil, Iraq, to serve with Mennonite Central Committee. We were living with the couple whose place we were going to take—Jim and Deb. Jim and Deb […]
Voices
We’re great at eavesdropping, at reading other people’s mail. That’s what we do when we read the Bible, our holy scriptures, all the writings complied in this book, letters and stories written to other people, ancient peoples in faraway lands. But in these words, in these stories, we’ve come to hear echoes of God’s voice—God […]
Deny yourself
“Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’” (Matthew 16:24). Self-denial. That’s what we do, as Christians. That’s who we are. We deny ourselves the things of this world—and we call it discipleship, discipline. Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it costly […]
Keys, keys, keys
“I got them keys, keys, keys / I got them keys, keys, keys / I got them keys, keys, keys.” That’s DJ Khaled. He’s a rapper, kinda. And when I hear Jesus in our passage tell us that he will give us the keys to the kingdom, I hear DJ Khaled’s beat, his keys, keys, […]
O my people
“O my people.” The words from our hymn have been circling in my head ever since Eric sent me the list of songs Friday afternoon, at 2pm, in an email I read on my phone in front of the old courthouse in Durham, near the empty pedestal where a metal figure of a confederate soldier […]
Peter walks on water
By now most all of you have heard about, read about, seen footage of the white supremacist rallies that took place in Charlottesville yesterday. You have taken in the images of the predictable violence that erupted, the confused tangle of words and outrage and lack of outrage and looking the other way that largely marks […]
One congregation, twenty preachers: a harmony of views
Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship has heard sermons from twenty preachers in the years 2014-2016, while having only one person, Isaac Villegas, as pastor. He gives about half the sermons. The congregation existed for its first five years without a pastor, and established a pattern of rotating sermon responsibilities. Most of the preachers are regular worshipers […]
I did not know it
Jacob is on the run, crossing border after border, fleeing from his brother who has threatened to kill him. The sun has set. His feet ache. He has to rest. So he finds a rock for a pillow and falls asleep. And he dreams. There’s a ladder reaching from ground beside him into heaven, and […]
But Rebekah loved Jacob
“Isaac loved Esau, because he was fond of game; but Rebekah loved Jacob…”~ Genesis 25: 28 One of the best things about preaching at CHMF is also one of the worst things about preaching at CHMF: Every time you do it, you have to follow whoever preached the week before, you have to take the […]
What love can do
I told Isaac after the service last week that a more fitting lyric for his sermon, in contrast to the Chance the Rapper line, “the praises go up/the blessings come down,” would have been a line from “Wait For It” from Hamilton: “Love doesn’t discriminate/between the sinners and the saints/it takes and it takes and […]
Please
Grace and mercy—that God gives us what we don’t deserve, what we haven’t earned, and refuses to punish us for the wrongs we’ve done. That’s our faith, in summary. We trust in God’s grace and mercy, we try to embody God’s grace and mercy. We gather for worship, we come together as a church, so […]
The PG-13 Life of Sarah & Abe
Prayer: Lord, we seek to understand the heroes of scripture, even when we are separated from them by 4000 years and enormous cultural differences. Lead us to the eternal truth contained in the story of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and Ishmael. This note before I start: Much will be said about Abraham and Sarah. Their names […]
Mercy
Leipzig Service for the Shenandoah Bach Festival: June 18, 2017 Jesus must have learned his prophetic ministry from his mother. She was the one who said, “The Lord has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” […]
Oaks of Mamre
Genesis 18:1-15 June 18. 2017 Last year I was in a city called Hebron in Hebrew and Al-Khalil in Arabic, an ancient city in the West Bank that has been home to Jews and Muslims for generations. As I was walking through the old city, near downtown, I saw a sign that said, “Mamre” pointing […]
a God who could dance
Trinity Sunday “I would only believe in a god who could dance.” That’s a line from Friedrich Nietzsche. He couldn’t believe in the kind of God who looks like a bearded man, ancient, sitting in a throne above, aloof, far away from our lives, distant from our world, safe from our chaos, uncontaminated by our […]