So, John 3:16. What do you think of when you hear those words? I think of football games with people holding up big signs that can be picked up by the tv camera. I think of judgment. It makes me roll my eyes and squirm. “For God so loved the...

Why do we give things up or take things on during the season of Lent? It is certainly not something that Jesus’ first followers did. There is some evidence that early Christians fasted forty hours between Good Friday and Easter, but the custom of spending forty days in prayer and...

“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” When I hear these words every Ash Wednesday I think about mortality and death. I think about my own death. I think about the death of those I love. And I feel more than a little uncomfortable. I am...

This morning I want to focus on Peter, one of the main characters in our Gospel reading for today. Peter appears frequently throughout the Gospel of Matthew. Some of his appearances are humorous and some are tragic, but they are always human. He is full of all the good and...

Our Gospel passage for this week is tough. It seems to be verse after verse of raising the bar. Don’t just keep yourself from killing other people, don’t even get angry with them. Don’t just keep yourself from committing adultery, don’t even allow yourself to look at another person with...

You are the salt of the earth. . . You are the light of the world. I want you to listen to these words from Jesus very closely. They are so familiar to us that it is easy to miss the profound message in them. You are the salt of...

On Thursday this past week, when both my children were finally back in school after 10 days of illness and I was trying to awaken my own illness-recovering brain, I spied an email sent to me by someone I hadn’t heard from in a long time (not anyone from St....

When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” John 1:38 Very frequently when someone comes to meet with me to talk about a personal concern, I begin our time together by asking, “What brings you here today?” Or to put it another...

Whether we call ourselves Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Mormon, Sikh, Agnostic, Atheist, Consumerist, Secularist, Humanist, or whatever, we follow a religion. All human beings are innately religious. We are made to be religious. The dictionary defines religion as, “1. the belief in and worship of a superhuman power or powers,...

Over the past few years, I have noticed that a new expression has entered the everyday speech of many Americans: “Living your best life.” There are hundreds and hundreds of self-help books carrying this title or this phrase within their titles. If you google the phrase, you will get millions...