Well lent is here folks. We are at the beginning of our season of preparation, preparation for Easter. For the next forty days, the church encourages us to keep a Lenten fast by, and I quote from the Ash Wednesday service; “by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating […]

I have to be quite honest. There is really nothing about this parable from Matthew that I like and is one of the reasons that I struggle with the Gospel of Matthew. “The weeping and gnashing of teeth” is one of my least favorite scriptural phrases and appears in Matthew a total of six times. […]

Fear. I would imagine that this was the primary emotion floating around that upper room in Jerusalem more than 2000 years ago. This small band of Jesus followers have been on quite a rollercoaster. For a few years they ardently listened to and followed Jesus. He gave them hope and courage in a time when […]

Most of the time I am very happy that we are a lectionary-based church. This means that the scripture we read on Sundays comes from a three-year schedule of assigned readings. I don’t pick the readings for a given Sunday. They are picked for us by the people who created the lectionary. The benefit of […]

Did you know that they make glasses that cause the wearer’s vision to be turned upside-down? When you look through the glasses, up is down, left is right and right is left. The idea behind the lesson is to help us understand how our eyes take in what they see and then flip it upside-down […]

As I read our lessons for today in preparation for writing this sermon, I found myself drawn to and intrigued by our reading from Nehemiah. I think there were two reasons for this. First, it has been a long time since I studied this book of the Bible, and I realized I had forgotten most […]