ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGSApril 6, 2024The other night, I kept getting cramps in my right foot, specifically my toes. I get leg or foot cramps occasionally, but not very often. But I must have crawled out of bed seven or eight times as they kept on coming back. Nothing I did seemed to alleviate that painful contraction. At some point, I remembered that when cleaning out my mother’s apartment, she
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGSApril 5, 2024There were a lot of confused folks in regard to the resurrected Jesus; at least that’s the implication when I read Jesus saying to his disciples, “Ghosts don’t have flesh and bones as you see I have” (Luke 24:39). Those words were probably important a century later, when a group began to push what is called Gnosticism. That is a term used to describe a
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGSApril 4, 2024In Sunday’s sermon, I will look at Luke’s next resurrection account. Yesterday, I mentioned the Road to Emmaus, where two unnamed individuals met the resurrected Christ during a meal. On Sunday, we will be turning to the very next story, where Jesus, fresh from the tomb and a walk along the road between Jerusalem and Emmaus, meets his disciples. Jesus greeted them, and it says
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGSApril 3, 2024It wasn’t until four years ago that I first learned that we had lost Emmaus. According to Luke’s Gospel, the first resurrection encounter occurred on the Road to Emmaus when two unnamed individuals encountered the Risen Christ, yet they did not recognize him until he broke the bread with them. According to the story found in Luke 24, Emmaus is a town an hour’s walk
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGSApril 2, 2024Yesterday, Texas Christian University (TCU) made an important public announcement. They are dropping their historic mascot, the Horned Frog, and going with a Fighting Squirrel. Of course, it was an April Fools’ Joke… and it was good. The TCU Chancellor, Victor Boschini, did a great job presenting the gag on a well-done video. Why do we have an unofficial national holiday where we try to
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGSApril 1, 2024Prayer for the Week: Eternal God, Never-ending Source of Love, we pause on this Monday after Easter with the hope that we did not leave the substance of Easter well packaged and fully preserved within the confines of Easter Day. Since death and a tomb could not contain you, why should we act as if a day on the calendar could even begin to hold
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGSEASTER SUNDAYMarch 31, 2024Good Morning! It is Easter!! For forty days, we have been on a Lenten Journey that culminates today. And though our Lenten Theme of Pressing the Reset Button has come to a conclusion, I pray that you took seriously the notion of the reset in your own life and maybe even found a couple of specific places to start. One of the areas where
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGSMarch 30, 2024On what is often called Dark Saturday, I am looking a little further into Matthew’s telling of Holy Week, specifically after the arrest and torture of Jesus. In Matthew 26:71-72, we read of what is often called Peter’s Denial: “When Peter had gone out to the gate, another servant girl saw him and said to some people there, ‘This man was with Jesus from Nazareth.’
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGSMarch 29, 2024As we take another step in this Holy Week experience, I am drawn to the words immediately before the arrest of Jesus, as he was praying in the garden, and you can feel his anguish. There we read, “Again Jesus went to pray and said, ‘My Father, if there is no other way, and I must suffer, I will still do what you want’” (Matthew
ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGSMarch 28, 2024As we move further into the Holy Week story as told in Matthew’s Gospel, we learn of an unnamed woman who entered the home of Simon the Leper (how would you like to have what sounds like a last name be an illness that you have? I’d be Bruce the Multiple Sclerosis) and opened a jar containing very expensive perfume. She poured it on Jesus’