All the Assembly Kept Silence

Download a PDF of this sermon Amos 7:7-15 • Acts 15:6-12 In 2008, a fragment of a sermon by Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ got clipped into the news cycle for some days. To the shock and awe of millions, that preacher, who was pastor...

Resistance and Resilience

In the days before the inauguration, I viewed a four-hour documentary on PBS. Called “The Divided States of America,” it examined how Americans grew far apart during the presidency of Barack Obama. Grief gripped me as I watched. Frame after frame revealed the unrestrained hatred of countless Americans for our former president. . . What was its source?

The Discipline of Death

Did the dead really come to life at the touch of Elisha? I don’t know. But I know this. If my faith hung on whether these stories are facts, faith would not be faith. If these stories just had to be scientifically so, else I lose my trust in God, then my religion would be thin and brittle and ideological and small. We have these stories not because we know they happened but because, in their extremity of need, people said, Tell us that one again, master . . .

Breaking Ground

Tto quote rather famously, “Oh Jonah, he lived in a whale [2x] / For he made his home in / That fish’s abdomen . . . but it ain’t necessarily so. Indeed, the story of Jonah is not about that fish. And the book is so easy to read—just four chapters—that we ought to wonder: Has church focused on the unbelievable word in this book in order to not hear the undesirable word from the book?