ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 28, 2025 So yesterday, I officiated a little wedding in the chapel—a lovely young couple. About 20 minutes before the wedding started, I got two rather large splinters from a piece of wood, right on the end of my left index finger, including one of them going under my fingernail. I was able to quickly pull out the one under the fingernail, but the other
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 27, 2025 Tomorrow, we will begin a five-week journey of casting a vision of where we are going as a church, using one of our Core Values each week as a sort of jumping-off place. And yes, I am using a space metaphor for going somewhere; the implication, of course, is that we are going somewhere we’ve never been before. Because the Gospel is always
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 26, 2025 I was recently reminded of a Tony Campolo quote that I’ve loved. Tony once famously said, “Mixing religion and politics is like mixing ice cream and horse manure. It doesn’t hurt the manure, but it ruins the ice cream.” Ruin is probably an understatement, and my concern is that the mix of religion and politics right now is making a stinky mess of
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 25, 2025 Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.” Those words have been rattling around inside of me for a few weeks. I’m not sure if I’d use them in my sermon this week or not. Yet I find myself agreeing with the words and then adding a caveat, a reason to sort of disagree.
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 24, 2025 So, if you are reading this, then it means you were not taken away to heaven yesterday. Of course, there is always the possibility that folks can continue to receive email and peruse social media after being snatched from this world and taken into the clouds. Whatever the case, I have not heard of planes crashing to the ground because pilots were raptured,
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 23, 2025 What happens when something that seemed so far away from your family context, something so outside what you believed could impact you directly, ends up on your doorstep? It might be a frightening diagnosis, betrayal, change in relationship, addition to the family, death, layoff, or mental health crisis. There are those crises that were a long time in the making, something we could
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 22, 2025 Prayer for the Week: Yesterday, was International Day of Peace We pray for the power to be gentle, the strength to be forgiving, the patience to be understanding, and the endurance to accept the consequences of holding to what we believe to be right. May we put our trust in the power of good to overcome evil and the power of love to
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 21, 2025 George Bernanos was a French author who was very much shaped by his experience in WWI. He wrote, “The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.” Not only would I agree, but what I see happen in so many settings, from business to government to religion itself, is that the end is
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS September 20, 2025 When was the last time you received forgiveness? When was the last time you extended forgiveness? In a faith built around a God whose mercy is beyond anything one could imagine, I would hope we could name times when we had been on the receiving end of forgiveness. And since we claim to follow a man named Jesus who, among other things, offered
In last Sunday’s sermon, I referenced Christian Nationalism, a very non-Christian and undemocratic movement. John Fugelsang, in his new book,“Separation of Church and Hate,” writes, “There is a growing plague of politicians, preachers, and influencers who wrap themselves in religious language while attacking anti-discrimination policies, women, immigrants, the poor, the struggling, LGBTQ people, and anyone else on society’s margins… it’s cruelty in piety drag.”