Serving your Neighbor

The Swiss-German novelist Hermann Hesse published a short story in 1932 called "Journey to the East." In it, a group of men go on a long journey. Throughout their trip, they are accompanied ...

If you have ever watched the President of the United States deliver the State of the Union Address in recent years, you know that at some point in his speech, he will point to the balcony and introduc...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Missing the point? In the days when the tourist business was good in Israel, some entrepreneurial chap set up a tent between Jerusalem ...

He who gives of his goods to help the poor, to send children to school, to educate them in God’s Word and other arts ... he is giving to the baby Jesus.

Almighty God, in raising Jesus from the grave, you shattered the power of sin and death. We confess that we remain captive to doubt and fear, bound by the ways that lead to death. We are slow to perce...

Leader: By grace, through Jesus, God calls us His children so that we might become more like Him, living as holy people who fear the Lord and serve one another in humility and love. When we honestly...

Introduction Only John’s Gospel tells us that Jesus washed his disciple’s feet during his last meal with them. The other texts for this day remember the Passover and the context it sets for Jesus’s w...

Heavenly Father, you have called us to step outside the church and into your world to carry out your kingdom work. We are to love our neighbors, serve those who may call us enemies, and pray for those...

In the intro sequence of the beloved children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood , the first interior shot does not show the host. Instead, in the beat before Fred Rogers appears on the screen si...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Missing the point? In the days when the tourist business was good in Israel, some entrepreneurial chap set up a tent between Jerusalem ...

Christian politics concerns how we integrate our confession that Jesus is Lord with our call to love our neighbors.

Our mission is the mission of Jesus Christ.  He lived as an ordinary human being. We will care for the common life of humanity. He served men and women. We are committed to working for human wel...

Reflection We all are aware of cultures that have a hierarchy—a pecking order. The elite and the hoi polloi. The acceptable and the unacceptable. In such cultures, the hierarchy determines the role. ...

We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts...

2,000 years later, religious people are still asking Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" And Jesus says that our neighbors are the people we are most likely to ignore, to dislike, to pass by.

Examine your heart often to see if it is such toward your neighbor as you would like his to be toward you were you in his place. This is the touchstone of true reason.

Tom and Angela had lived in their neighborhood for about twelve years without really getting to know many people. They lived in a cul-de-sac of eleven houses and had limited communication and interact...

You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.