by Stephen Phelps | Dec 11, 2011 | interpretation, relinquishment, sermon 2011, transformation
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?
by Stephen Phelps | Dec 4, 2011 | baptism, freedom, race, racism, sermon 2011
Since Derrick Bell’s death, I have been steeping myself in his sober stories that explore how the “racial bonding of whites means that black rights and interests are always vulnerable to diminishment if not . . . destruction.”
by Stephen Phelps | Nov 20, 2011 | freedom, relinquishment, sermon 2011, stewardship, transformation
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.
by Stephen Phelps | Nov 13, 2011 | America, economic justice, sermon 2011, stewardship
Almost 180 years ago, the French citizen Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the new America and later described the character of our people in essays which still startle us Americans with features so recognizable. He saw, for example, our vaunted individualism. He defined it as “a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends . . .”
by Stephen Phelps | Nov 6, 2011 | sermon 2011, stewardship
When something breaks, we see what at once, or search for it. But when something works, like the stairs of a stone path or the good will of a teen, who can say where the working is? Anything that works comprises an infinite quantity of good links, from the big stuff we’ve just described right down to the mysteriously bonding molecules and atoms . . .
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