February 2015

  • Other People’s Clothes

    ·

    In the front load washer, I can see whites and darks and grays mixed together. The checked blue shirt, gym shorts with the single cinched drawstring, and the lacy number that may be a halter top. I look at your clothes like an alien species or as a xenophobe looks at their neighbor, considering him…

    Read More

  • The Beasts and the Angels

    ·

    How Jesus’s time in the wilderness reminds us of our own journey. So this thing we call The Temptation of Jesus isn’t really about temptation, or about the Tempter or about GOD and the problem of evil at all. It’s about experience, creation, and GOD. It is about living in this world that GOD has…

    Read More

  • Make the Kingdom

    ·

    What Ash Wednesday tells us about what Jesus really wants. It is a time of wrestling with weighty issues of faith and of community; of justice and of the nature of GOD. To wrestle and prepare one another for greater unity. To heal the broken, to care for the weak, to help flip over and…

    Read More

  • In the Middle

    ·

    The Transfiguration, Peter, and how it feels in the inbetween. The middle, the hinge point in Mark is the end of chapter 8, when Jesus tells the disciples what is about to happen to him and to the movement, and the beginning of chapter 9, when Jesus is transfigured on the mountain. This is the…

    Read More

  • How to Really Celebrate Valentine’s Day

    ·

    I used to hate Valentine’s Day. It’s a Hallmark holiday I’d say. It’s an excuse to buy somebody more stuff I’d say. It’s about making the women in our lives happy I’d say. I was much more cynical then. At its root, the problem I had with the way we celebrate Valentine’s Day is that it…

    Read More

  • Why Can’t I Get My Kid To the Bus On Time?

    ·

    I get up early. I shower. I wake her up. We eat breakfast. We do this every single day. So why do we fail at this one task: actually getting to the bus stop on time? It shouldn’t be that hard, really. And yet it really is the hardest part of the day. Every morning.…

    Read More

  • No More Racists

    ·

    We struggle with truly understanding racism. Many of us think that racism is what begins inside our hearts. That racism is the necessary outward expression of an internal feeling of bias or racial animus. That one hates another so much that they intentionally push them down and oppress them. We often think that racism is only…

    Read More

  • The Servant God

    ·

    A mother-in-law’s gratitude at odds with the public spectacle. Jesus leaves town, perhaps because of his notoriety, but perhaps also because the people are more interested in him, in the wonders that he has done, in the power that he possesses. And not in what GOD is calling him to actually do. Not in what…

    Read More