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All This Has Happened To Me!
All This Has Happened To Me! (Day 14 of A Simple Lent) The Jacob saga in Genesis is fascinating to me. Here is the grandson of Abraham, the blessed, receiver of the covenant, and he is a world-class jerk. Selfish. Thieving. Conniving. Not what you would think of as godly in any way. And certainly…
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Trembling to One Another
Trembling to One Another (Day 13 of A Simple Lent) People are funny. Sometimes “funny ha-ha”. Usually just “funny strange”. Either way, I laugh. There’s something telling in the Joseph story for today – about these brothers who go down to Egypt to get food to bring home to their father (Jacob) and they encounter…
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Truth
Truth (Day 12 of A Simple Lent) In a political campaign, it often seems like the biggest loser is sincerity and truth. It becomes easy for websites like FactCheck.org to parse every political statement or for confusions to blossom into controversies: such as fear of bias leading to a made up story of people chanting of…
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Am I to Come to You With a Stick?
Am I to Come to You With a Stick (Day 11 of A Simple Lent) As we get further into this letter to the church in Corinth, we are now starting to see what has Paul so mad. Not the specific stuff, that’s coming later. We’re getting the question of authority. As in the people are…
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To Save Life Or To Kill
To Save Life Or To Kill (Day 10 of A Simple Lent) My absolute favorite part of Jesus’s teaching is his few teachings about Sabbath. I think dealing with them is an essential part of understanding Jesus. Sabbath law is at the core of Torah. The literal observance of the Sabbath day is important. More important,…
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New Wineskins
New Wineskins (Day 9 of A Simple Lent) One of the most familiar passages in scripture is Jesus’s famous line about not putting new wine into old wineskins. It’s one of those images with which I was always familiar, but it never fit in with my world. I mean, how many of us have a wineskin?…
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He Said / She Said
He Said / She Said (Day 8 of A Simple Lent) I’m not really sure if I’m supposed to like Joseph. His Dad, Jacob, was a jerk. He was a liar and a thief, who seemed to take advantage of the blessing of GOD. And even after wrestling with his creator on the banks of the…
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True Wisdom
True Wisdom (Day 7 of A Simple Lent) One of the things I never understood about wisdom is that our word for wisdom is not the same as the word in the Bible. Oh, it is wisdom all right. It just means something totally different. When I think of wisdom, I think of D&D (Dungeons…