Beyond Good and Evil
Download a PDF of the sermon text Genesis 38: 6-26; Mark 13: 33-37 What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil. –Friedrich Nietzsche The story of Tamar and Judah is by no means a...Why the Chimes Rang
“There was once, in a far-away country where few people have ever traveled, a wonderful church. It stood on a high hill in the midst of a great city; and every Sunday, as well as on sacred days like Christmas, thousands of people climbed the hill to its great archways . . . ” — a story written by Raymond MacDonald Alden
The Big Picture
If we pull the camera lens way back on the Bible stories, so that all of them fit in one big picture, the way all of Planet Earth finally fit in the lens of a moonwalker’s camera many decades ago; if we pull so far back that the particular stories seem like Italies and Indias did to the spacemen, yet so clearly part of something bigger, what is that bigger thing, bigger than any single story, bigger even than all of them together, yet present and full in every single one of them?
Watching the River Flow
Every year in America, thousands of churches fail because they had nothing to say to the children—the grown children, that is, like Abram and his wife Sarai when Papa Terah made Haran home. Consider. When we won’t cross the rivers always known to us for lands never yet shown to us, money is always the matter.
The Bottom of the Waves
The blunt fact is that scriptures Old and New pronounce a fulsome God damn not on foreign nations but on the prophets’ own land. Stiff-necked Bible-thumpers prefer Micah mounted in museum glass to the real thing. But if we do not take scissors to our scriptures, then those blunt words of Rev. Jeremiah Wright exactly match the purpose of the prophets: to that land which perverts equity through greed and force the word is, God damn!
Recent Comments