humor on Jesus' Example

Jesus’ actions, in and of themselves, often make no sense unless we see them as responses to some hidden invitation—an invitation received from time spent alone with his Father. When Jesus was interru...

The symbol of judgment and death, the serpent, is lifted up as Israel’s symbol of life. Jesus draws this parallel for us in John, hinting toward the way the tool of Roman execution, the cross, will be...

Christian civility does not commit us to a relativistic perspective. Being civil doesn’t mean that we cannot criticize what goes on around us.  …Civility is a different matter, though. I can treat ...

If you want to know who God is, look at Jesus. If you want to know what it means to be human, look at Jesus. If you want to know what love is, look at Jesus. If you want to know what grief is, look at...

Dag Hammarskjöld, a Swedish economist and diplomat deeply committed to his Christian faith, served as the Secretary-General of the United Nations during some of the most turbulent times of the Cold Wa...

Many of us may have wondered what types of prayers Jesus would have prayed during his time on planet earth. In his book Praying with the Church , Scot McKnight notes that Jesus and his disciples,...

In these acts of love Jesus created a scandal for devout, religious Palestinian Jews. The absolutely unpardonable thing was not his concern for the sick, the cripples, the lepers, the possessed . . . ...

Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in his classic study Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity that the term stigma originated with the ancient Greeks, roughly during Jesus’ tim...

T. S. Eliot once described the current human endeavor as that of finding a system of order so perfect that we will not have to be good. The way of Jesus tells us, by contrast, that any number of syste...

I was invited to visit a friend who was very sick. He was a man about fifty-three years old who had lived a very active, useful, faithful, creative life. Actually, he was a social activist who had car...

A few years ago, my daily Bible reading had me in Revelation, perhaps the trickiest New Testament book to read and interpret. As I have taught this book in small groups and in sermons, I often advise ...

Maybe this sounds silly, but go outside and look up. You cannot see yourself. All you see is a vast expanse of possibilities. Look down. You will see yourself and little else. This is true in life. Lo...

Imagine you were cast to play the role of legendary baseball player Babe Ruth in a biography of his life. You could simply follow the script, reading out what is written. How much better, though, to s...

In 1878, when William Booth’s Salvation Army was beginning to make its mark, men and women from all over the world began to enlist. One man, who had once dreamed of becoming a bishop, crossed the Atla...

Reporters Alex Alston and James Dickerson tell a sad story about a church that sought to integrate its ranks: The Mississippi Delta was in a tizzy over rumors that blacks might show up at white church...

Humble. Before Jesus, almost no pagan author had used “humble” as a compliment. Yet the events of Christmas point inescapably to what seems like an oxymoron: a humble God. The God who came to earth ca...

Following always involves a coming down, a humbling of oneself and a serving of others. Jonathan Edwards, the Puritan theologian, captured this condescension of God in his sermon "The Excellency ...

There’s Republican Jesus who is against tax increases and activists judges, and for family values and owning firearms. There’s Democrat Jesus who is against Wall Street and Walmart, and for reducing ...

For most of us, Jesus’s world is a strange, foreign country. I don’t mean just the Middle East, a major international trouble spot then as now. I mean that people in his day and in his country thought...

The cross of Jesus is the world’s supreme example of anguish, suffering and injustice, but it has nothing to do with tragedy as we experience it in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Shakespeare—trag...

I was driving in Columbus, Ohio, when I came upon a hitchhiker who alternated between holding his thumb out and clasping his hands together as if he were praying. I picked him up. His name was Mike, a...

Regarding the average human’s awareness of their own culture, career anthropologist Darrell Whiteman has said that “it is scarcely a fish who would discover water.” This is a reliable statement. Human...

A number of years ago I was discipling a young man who had recently been released from the state’s juvenile detention center. As a teenager he had been hooked on drugs, and he had resorted to stealing...

Since I was very young my life has been dominated by two strong voices. The first said, “Make it in the world and be sure you can do it on your own.” And the other voice said, “Whatever you do for the...

Jesus knew his spiritual journey depended on responsiveness to God’s invitations. Although his job was the most crucial in human history, Jesus did not get compulsive, preoccupied or unable to practic...

One of my daughters has been singing a song about Jesus that contains the line “Jesus was a story-tellin’ man.” When I first heard that line it seemed a bit flip, as so many contemporary Christian son...

There is one other problem people can have with the Trinity: that the word never appears in the Bible. Now that doesn’t sound good, and it’s given rise to the legend of the Trinity as the invention of...

A few years ago, a vicious stomach bug swept through our community. (When you live in a religious community and one person gets sick, it’s just a matter of time before everyone else does too.) And one...

It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate Son of God, that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life…my reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus by h...

First, what is the ascension? It is not simply Jesus’ return from the earth to heaven. It is a new enthronement for Jesus, bringing a new relationship with us and with the whole world.  …In fact, t...