Romans 8:38-39, Acts 2:42-47, Mark 4:35-41, Luke 17:11-19, Psalm 68:19
Deacon or other leader With all our heart and with all our mind, let us pray to the Lord, saying "Lord, have mercy." For the peace from above, for the loving-kindness of God, and for the ...
John 1:14, Hebrews 11:10, John 14:2-3, Psalm 90:1, Hebrews 13:14, Luke 2:1-10
Home shall men come To an older place than Eden And a taller town than Rome. To the end of the way of the wandering star; To the things that cannot be and that are, To the place where God was homeless...
A prominent citizen in town was dying. As he lay in his lovely home, the best doctors surrounding him, he whispered, with a note of despair, ‘I’m leaving home, I’m leaving home.’ Across town there la...
Luke 10:25-37, Matthew 13:34-35, Acts 13:15, Mark 12:28-31, John 10:22-23
As in buying real estate, three principles are crucial to understanding a person’s words: location, location, and location. We cannot make sense of what someone says unless we understand the context i...
Luke 16:10, Acts 17:26-27, Zechariah 4:10, Matthew 25:21, Colossians 3:23-24
One of the seductions that continues to bedevil Christian obedience is the construction of utopias, whether in fact or fantasy, ideal places where we can live the good and blessed and righteous life w...
I’d grown up in a Boston suburb where people’s homes were set behind deep hedges or protected by huge yards and neighbors hardly knew each other. And they didn’t need to: nothing ever happened in my t...
Matthew 27:46, Hebrews 4:15, 1 Peter 3:18, John 19:30, 1 Peter 4:13
In Elie Wiesel’s Night , Eliezer is a Jewish teenager, a devoted student of the Talmud from Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupied Hungary. Increasingly repressi...
In the excellent book, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes , Brandon J. O’Brien shares a helpful illustration of how different churches deal with alcohol very differently: When I (Brandon) w...
Father, we come to express our appreciation for you as our great Shepherd. We are your sheep whom you know by name. Accept now the praise we as your flock offer in your presence. We thank you sincere...
God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—our Loving Creator, Redeemer and Guide: We praise and thank You for being with us wherever we are on the journey of faith; whether we feel You or not—You are here wit...
Holy God–Father, Son and Spirit: We come with our agendas in order to enlist you in our causes but You won’t be co-opted for our small visions. Instead, You hold out a greater vision and purpose and i...
Nehemiah 1:1-11, Acts 16:25-34, Mark 4:35-41, Acts 2:1-13, Luke 10:25-37, Matthew 11:28-30, Acts 1:8
Lord–Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Thank You that there’s no place we can hide from Your Spirit, no place we can flee from Your presence. We can’t go beyond the reach of Your love, nor out-distance the...
1 Peter 5:7, 2 Corinthians 1:3-4, Psalm 34:15, Mark 4:39-40, Luke 7:12-15, Mark 10:46-52, Luke 19:5-6
Lord—You’re the God who notices. You notice a desperate woman who touches Your garments in a crowd. You notice a lonely, little tax-collector in a tree. You notice a blind man on the roadside, a widow...
James 1:17, 1 Peter 5:6-7, Philippians 4:6-7, Romans 15:13, John 14:27, Isaiah 40:31
Loving God ~ Father, Son and Holy Spirit: We are a people who are waiting: waiting to celebrate Messiah’s birth; waiting to see what this day–and every day–holds as Your blessings for us; and waiting ...
James 5:14-15, Romans 8:38-39, Matthew 28:20, Isaiah 41:10, Psalm 23:4, 2 Corinthians 1:3-4, Psalm 139:7-10
Risen and present Lord: There’s no place we go–near or far, high or low, familiar or strange–where you aren’t there with and even before us. There is no experience we have or feeling we feel that’s un...
Micah 7:19, Philippians 3:13-14, Luke 9:62, Matthew 10:37-39, 2 Corinthians 5:17
Sister Joan Chittister writes about regret in the context of aging, though I think most of us can identify with this personification of Mr. R.: Regret…comes upon us one day dressed up like wisdom, l...
I was crossing the street in a small town one day, walking towards the entrance to a restaurant. A lone man was standing in front of the restaurant, between me and the door but at least five feet away...
When I ask the high school students at my church to name a celebrity, they can instantly rattle off a list of twenty. When I ask them to say who their heroes are, their response is usually quiet silen...
When legendary magician Harry Houdini came into a town to do his show, he often went to the local jail, gathering a crowd of people along the way. To get buzz going about his upcoming performance, he ...
More people of color than whites live in the city of Dallas and in the city of Fort Worth. But they are more likely to live in poorer inner-city areas while whites live in the more affluent suburbs. D...
“It is good once in a while to feel oneself in the hands of God,” Søren Kierkegaard once wrote, “and not always eternally slinking around the familiar nooks and corners of a town where one always know...
Honoré de Balzac would eventually become a celebrated writer in post-Napoleanic France. He was renowned for his complex characters and realistic writing style. But like many young and aspiring writers...
A few weeks after our Christmas at the DPAC, I visited Saint Matthew’s Episcopal Church, a quaint chapel one town over from Durham in Hillsborough, North Carolina. This place was never a megachurch, b...
To be sure, groups, when they are functioning well, can be among our best defenses against vicious self-deception. But when group thinking is replaced by what psychologists call “groupthink,” results ...
In his book, The Joy Model, former management consultant Jeff Spafadora describes the moment that lead him to change careers: One spring break Michelle and I took the kids to Disney World. My mom an...
The creation of a white standard in the world during the age of exploration, and the white structural privilege prevalent for so long in America, led to what is often called “white privilege”. This is...
In The Good and Beautiful God , James Bryan Smith describes a new Christian he happened to know who came to him one day feeling dejected. He was so excited to be a follower of Jesus, but he just co...
Nakedness is the subject of one of the most famous folk parables of power: Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” A vain emperor is visited by two “weavers” who promise that their...
In the film Of Gods and Men , director Xavier Beauvois tells the story of a small group of mostly French monks living in Algeria during a time of civil unrest. These monks live a life of quiet fideli...