The story about the prophet Jonah, if it is familiar, is probably familiar in broad strokes and mostly for the first half of the story. This is the part where God asks Jonah to do something Jonah isn’t too excited about doing – go to the people of Nineveh, a powerful, foreign city, and warn […]
How far should we go in advocating for others? Should we dispute with God as we pray for them? Scripture Watch the Livestream
In the Jewish texts called the Talmud there are some teachings of 2nd and 3rd century Common Era rabbis that talk about whether or not God prays, and if God prays, what does God pray. It sort of sounds like a spiritual version of the omnipotence paradox, “Can God create a stone so heavy that […]
This is quite the story to kick off our summer sermon series about “Disputing with God.” It’s at once familiar, at least in its outline and persistent cultural allusions, and at the same time like that movie we saw a long time ago, the whose general plot we can remember, but the details and side […]
Each day at Vacation Bible School, our children explored a different part of God’s Word and the good news given to them. Today we going to hear the same message at this past week’s VBS through five Scripture readings and five short reflections. Our theme this year was “Blastoff! God’s Big Universe.” All week long, […]
“For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law….” How’s that for a “Happy Father’s Day!”? Several times this week, as we read this morning’s scriptures for our staff meeting devotions and when we gathered for the Wednesday Bible study, I’ve […]
Two weeks ago, I began the story of my first night on call as a student chaplain in the hospital. I had begged my way into the internship program because the program supervisor (in training herself) had deemed me too young and inexperienced at first. After working several daytime shifts in the first week on […]
Aneri McGalla Do you ever feel like you’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop? I think the best example I can give of this is in a relationship. Say you had a massive argument months or years ago, you said you forgave each other, you said you moved past it, but every time […]
One of my first “hands on” ministry experiences took place during the month-long January term in the middle of my first year of seminary; I turned 23 years old that month. Instead of signing up for a traditional classroom elective course, I had applied for and was barely accepted into, a half unit of what […]
As we have already been reminded this morning a very real and worrisome way, the tongues of fire that suddenly appeared among the apostles gathered all together in one house for Pentecost probably didn’t give them a sense of the spirit, spirit of gentleness. Instead it came, as Acts tells us, with a sound like […]
We have been blessed this Easter season to have a variety of different preachers bringing us the Word in worship, and that continues this week as we welcome the Rev. Shelvis Smith-Mather. Our church has supported the Revs. Shelvis and Nancy Smith-Mather and their missionary work as peacemakers in South Sudan for sixteen years. Scripture Watch the Livestream
There’s this scene in Glee that instantly came to mind when I read the Gospel of John passage. For those who never watched it, Glee was a show about a high school show choir. It was loud and dramatic and often ridiculous, but underneath all the singing and chaos, it was about a bunch of teenagers trying to figure […]
