Noah’s ark is not a children’s story, a funny story or even a story concerned with history. This story is true even if it never happened. If you get past the strangeness, it sounds like recent events.
If Trump came to your church, what sermon would you want him to hear?
Many of President Trump’s actions are antithetical to the Gospel. But anger cannot be everything that Trump’s backers hear from us. Ministers would be better off, at times, asking the Spirit to help the president and his defenders understand that God loves all people.
Penitential pancakes: sin soaked in syrup
The point of Pancake Tuesday is not to get the partying out of our system before Lent begins. Feast days remind us to live in gratitude. Celebration, reveling in the pleasures of life, helps us pay attention.
Flight or invisibility: revisiting a classic theological question
In middle school we debated the great theological question: which superpower – flight or invisibility? I secretly preferred a third option: stopping time. But today what I need is the ability to be alive in this moment, in what Paul Tillich called the “eternal now.”
‘Amy Poehler is ruining my birthday!’ Checking our secret desire to be famous
Letting go of our desire to be famous could lead to better birthdays. Admiring people who do things worthy of our admiration – hard workers, loving parents, good listeners, caring teachers – could help us understand that anonymity is okay.
The Christmas Story is not an invitation to be safe and warm
Joseph is a supporting role in the Christmas story. Luke hardly mentions him, and he doesn’t get a single line of dialogue in the entire New Testament. But he should be the patron saint of taking chances.
Why Big Bird and Oscar cannot retire
What could be more therapeutic than being both Big Bird and Oscar? A tender, nurturing, childlike avian is great, but there is a part of us that is a crabby, trash-talking, green monster.
As a pastor, I’m not a fan of ministers telling people how to vote
Imagine how good government could be if those who say God is love took love for the poor, the desire for peace and an insistence on honesty into the voting booth. What wonderful things would happen if our values were derived from virtue rather than partisanship?
Entitlement: one more reason Brett Kavanaugh is unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court
Good lawyers can grow up in a society that offers preference to rich white men, but the privileged have to recognize their privilege as a gift to be shared. President Trump needs to find a nominee who can imagine what life is like for those who know that no matter how smart they are or how hard they work they will never go to Yale.
I am part of the resistance inside the American church
The church is facing a test unlike any faced in the modern era. It’s not just that the church is bitterly divided over politics. The dilemma is that not nearly enough of the church’s leadership is working diligently from within to frustrate the church’s worst inclinations.
Churches, wake up and smell the coffee: communion with a cup of joe?
Here is a question that needs to percolate: would coffee be a better symbol for communion? Grape juice is dull. Wine puts you to sleep. Coffee refreshes, revives and stimulates. The Lord’s Table could be a coffee table.
What I learned from my 8th-grade teacher in Mississippi in 1975
My junior high school reflected Mississippi’s poverty, racism and provincialism. Good teachers like Danny McBrayer fought uphill battles.