April this year is somewhat odd in that it doesn’t contain Easter Sunday. Easter most often occurs in April, but this year it came early, at the end of March, and so here April sits, Easter-less. Well, not exactly Easter-less, because every Sunday in April is a Sunday of Easter. It’s called the Easter Season,…
March is a pretty great month, just normally. You have March Madness, the NCAA’s annual tournament to determine the college basketball national champion. 66 teams enter, and they play their way down to The Final Four, and then a champion is crowned. It is very exciting, and I especially like to root for the underdog…
3 times in the reading from Matthew tonight, Jesus talks about the Father who sees in secret And I got to thinking – the Father who sees in secret – is that good news, or bad news I mean, we all have secrets We all have things we don’t like to talk about We all…
As I begin to write this article, I just typed 2016 for the first time. Wow, 2016. Remember Y2K? The years have certainly seemed to fly by, haven’t they? New years are intriguing things, aren’t they? On the one hand, it’s just another year, January 1st is just the next day after December 31st, and…
I had the radio on as I was driving around yesterday, and John Lennon’s song “Happy Christmas” came on The song begins, so this is Christmas, and, being a church professional, my first thought was, no, this is Advent (alright, it really wasn’t – my first thought was, that’s a good song – but work…
There are certainly some significant differences between the two people who come to Jesus for healing in this story The man is an important person in the community, while the woman is an outcast from the community The man has a name, Jairus, while the woman goes nameless The man comes to Jesus directly, speaks…
Pentecost was, a Jewish festival, originally meant to celebrate the harvest, it evolved into a celebration of Moses receiving the Law from God on Mt. Sinai The disciples of Jesus, all 120 of them perhaps, are gathered together to celebrate that festival And in the midst of this old thing, the Holy Spirit breaks in…
It’s kind of easy for us today to look back at the disciples, cowering in fear behind their locked door, and maybe get a little smug about it We might be tempted to say something like, oh, I would never do something like that I would have been out there, boldly telling the world that…
If you are familiar with “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens, you know it begins like this: Marley was dead, to begin with. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of our story. Well, to understand Easter, maybe we need to begin in a similar way: Jesus was dead, to begin with.…
Happy 2015 everyone! My hope and prayer is that this new year will bring you an abundance of blessings, an abundance of joy, an abundance of happiness, and an abundance of love. Whatever 2014 may have been for you, I hope that 2015 is better in every way. One of the best things about a…