Steadfast mercy
“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; God’s mercies never come to an end.” ~ Lamentations 3:22 I remember a crush I had one year in high school. I…
Preacher: Isaac Villegas
Words without knowledge
“Who is this who darkens my counsel with words without knowledge?” (Job 38:2) That line jumped off the page for me this week, after two months of not having to…
Covid 2: We wait
Our passage from Ezekiel opens with a vision, where the prophet is standing in the middle of a valley.He’s in the valley of the shadow of death, that place we…
Covid 1: With me
The prophet Samuel has gone through a lot at this point in the story. If we rewind a bit, he first told the people that a king would be a…
Son of Man, Sophia of God
No lyric has ever stopped a tank. No sermon has ever ended patriarchy, especially a sermon delivered by a man. But here we are, trying again, with some words about a few Scriptures—an invitation to live into new possibilities, a call for change. Because we are in need of reformation, we are in church always in need of reformation, to be renewed and restored. To be healed from the sexism that has plagued the church, that plagues our society, that infects our lives, our relationships.
Wisdom, creator of all things
Wisdom is the architect of all things, the builder of the world, the one who formed creation. That’s how the passage from the Wisdom of Solomon describes this cosmic person,…
God of our ancestors
In our passage from Exodus, when Moses talks with the burning bush, he asks the fire about its identity, about how to tell others about who this is, what kind…
Epiphanies
The magi see signs in the night sky, celestial revelations, announcing that the long-awaited Jewish king, the Messiah, has been born, and they want to pay their respects. After traveling…
Immanuel
This isn’t just the story of Christmas, just something we hear during this season, as we reflect on a few passages; but the story of the bible, the whole thing, is one long story of a God who has always been finding ways to be with us, to draw close to us, to struggle with us, to rest with us, because God likes us.
“Do not fear, O Soil”
In this passage from the book of Joel, we hear God speaking, not to human beings, but to soil and animals. We get to eavesdrop on their conversation, to listen to the sorts of things they talk about, God and the soil, God and the animals, when they chat.