Luke 19:1-10, Matthew 21:12-13, Mark 11:15-17, Luke 19:45-47
The purpose of that empire, like every empire, whether Babylon among the Jews, Rome in the time of Jesus, or the US empire . . . is to coercively extract wealth for the sake of the center. Zacchaeus s...
Colossians 3:15, Isaiah 11:9, John 16:33, Psalm 85:10, Matthew 5:9, Isaiah 26:3, Philippians 4:7
Almighty God, from whom all thoughts of truth and peace proceed; kindle, we ask, in the hearts of all people the true love of peace, and guide with your pure and peaceable wisdom those who take counse...
That is, there is no concept of a “natural” world in ancient Near Eastern thinking. The dichotomy between natural and supernatural is a relatively recent one. Deity pervaded the ancient world. Nothin...
Matthew 5:9, Psalm 2:2-4, Isaiah 9:6, Proverbs 21:1, Daniel 2:21
The Yalta Conference, helmed by Allied leadership (Most notably Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin) came at the conclusion of hostilities in Europe during WWII. It dealt with a...
To the prophet, God does not reveal himself in an abstract absoluteness, but in a personal and intimate relation to the world. He does not simply command and expect obedience; He is also moved and aff...
ANCIENT LENS What’s the historical context? Historical Background The Songs of Ascents celebrate the journey from Babylonian captivity to freedom in the homeland of Judah, and ultimately celebrat...
The speaker at a dinner I once attended was a Catholic nun, and the only reason that this was unusual was that the dinner was a gathering of triathletes at Ironman Canada in 2006. The nun, Sister Mado...
Pastor: “O LORD, rebuke me not in your anger, nor discipline me in your wrath. Be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am languishing; heal me, O LORD, for my bones are troubled. All: “My soul also is grea...
The world might stop in ten minutes; meanwhile, we are to go on doing our duty. The great thing is to be found at one’s post as a child of God, living each day as if it were our last, but planning as ...
In comparison to other societies, Americans and other North Atlantic peoples are naturalistic. Non-Western peoples are frequently concerned about the activities of supernatural beings . . . The wide-r...
I wouldn’t be surprised if, as a Protestant pastor, you approach All Saints’ Day with a little unease. After all, because Protestant churches tend not to have a special class of canonized exemplars ...
Robinson's Winsome Faith I’ve been reading Marilynne Robinson's novels and essays for some time now. Of her fiction, I’ve read Gilead , reflections of a retired minister written for his ...
Introduction What does it mean for God to be our refuge and strength? The context in which this psalm was written is vastly different than our own, and often we carry on our lives as if nothing trul...
In the book of Hebrews (and elsewhere in the New Testament and theology, generally), the Greek and Jewish worlds collide. A funny parallel may be drawn between this and George's complete meltdown ...
1 John 3:18, John 13:1-17, Luke 10:25-37, Matthew 4:18-22, James 1:22, Romans 12:1, Mark 10:15
It is possible also to come at Christianity from a rather different point of view as well, seeing it as something not too difficult but too simple for us, too basic, something to be apprehended theref...
In Understanding Genesis , Nahum Sarna argues that a critical distinction between Genesis and the stories of contemporary pagan societies is that Genesis is not myth . Myth is associated with ritual...
Whether the Hebrew Genesis account was meant to be science or not, it was certainly meant to convey statements of faith. As will be shown it is part of the biblical polemic against paganism and an int...
Something I’ve noticed over time is that, while we Protestants try to live “ sola scriptura (by scripture alone) ,” a large number of traditions have crept into our theology and praxis over time. One ...
We all love a good comeback story. In such tales, the young upstart rises like a meteor, fails big, then fights back against the odds to win the victory. Tech whiz Steve Jobs was like that. After prod...
Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to G...
In his book The Mystery of Christ , a series of fictionalized pastoral counseling sessions (based on actual events), the Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon shares a number of helpful ways of unde...
“The Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii erupted on May 17, 2018, at 4:17 a.m., spewing lava more than a thousand feet in the air. Homes and other structures in the wake of the lava flow and the eruption’s rela...
In 1933, as Hitler’s Nazi party rose to power in Germany, the Jewish artist Marc Chagall painted Solitude. In the foreground, a seated man sits wrapped in a tallit, or prayer shawl. His right hand sup...
It is possible also to come at Christianity from a rather different point of view as well, seeing it as something not too difficult but too simple for us, too basic, something to be apprehended theref...
The cross is the center of the world's history; the incarnation of Christ and the crucifixion of our Lord are the pivot round which all the events of the ages revolve. The testimony of Christ was ...
Stories, after all, are one of the most basic modes of human life and are a characteristic expression of worldview. Human life is constituted by a series of stories, implicit and explicit, that makes ...
We are surprised by evil when it hits us in the face. We think of small towns as pleasant, safe places and are shocked to the core when two little girls are murdered by someone they obviously knew and...
John 2:15-16, Romans 12:2, Ephesians 2:1-2, John 15:18-19, James 4:4
The world, though, is protean: each generation has the world to deal with in a new form. World is an atmosphere, a mood. It is nearly as hard for a sinner to recognize the world’s temptations as it is...
For centuries there have been innumerable theories as to when and how the world might end. Here are some highlights gleaned from alleged prophecies: In 960 Bernard of Thuringia, a German theologian, ...