Blog

It’s a classic question. Someone walks into your church on a Sunday morning, heads straight up the centre aisle to the pulpit and says “I’m Jesus, I have returned.” How do you know if it’s Jesus or not? I don’t have an exact answer for that, but, given the number of times Jesus says he’ll […]

The Widow’s Mite is the traditional name for a Bible story in the gospels of Mark and Luke about a poor widow that gives her last two coins to the temple treasury. Jesus comments to his disciples that, while they’ve seen many rich people contribute just a part of their wealth, she gave everything she […]

October 31 is a pretty important day, especially this year. Yes, you know what I mean. It’s Reformation Sunday, our annual recognition of the beginning of the movement that began Protestantism. It’s an important historical moment for anyone, but especially so if you’re part of that tradition. And I mean no disrespect to it when […]

“Who do you say that I am?” I wonder who Jesus was looking at when he asked his disciples this question. He’d already asked the easy one, what are the crowds saying. But now, he wanted their own view, their personal understanding of what he was all about. I imagine there was some shuffling feet, […]

We are often so much like Jesus’ first disciples in the early days. They followed Jesus around, from place to place, listening to his teaching, seeing what he was doing, and doing their best to understand. And we, like them, it seems, often don’t. If only we had more faith. That’s what the disciples said […]

It’s Thanksgiving this week. I mean the holiday, of course, not “thanks giving,” which we should want to do everyday. Even if we’re particularly focused on harvest thanksgiving, I hope we’d want to be grateful to farmers and the earth more than just one day a year. Oh, and the truck drivers, rail employees, processors […]

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how important story is in our lives. We live in story, we learn in it, we grieve in it and find joy in it, we love in it and we die in it. I could probably have stopped at “we live in it,” as life pretty much covers […]

The other day, I was having a conversation with someone from a very different Christian denomination than my own. It wasn’t contradictory, confrontational or disagreeable. In fact, we were pretty much agreeing, though we described it more like “being on the same page.” I think we’d also both agree that we don’t necessarily represent how […]

There’s a story in the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus is approached by a woman who asks him to heal her daughter who is possessed by an “unclean spirit” (Mark 7:24).  There’s a brief, but probably a little heated, exchange of words and Jesus tells the woman to go home where she will find her […]

The story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is so often told as a miracle of Jesus power to give life, whether physical or spiritual. But what if there’s another lesson here, not for the dead, but the living? “Jesus,” the boy called, “Jesus, you must come now. Lazarus needs you.” “So many people […]