Archive

As I write this, the snow is coming down outside and it’s been coming down for almost 24 hours. The kids and dogs in the park are having a great time and my snowy-day instincts are kicking in. I grew up mostly in Idaho and Iowa. I lived for my young adult years in Chicago. […]

Jesus was no mathematician. Jesus helped us to understand the nature of God in relationship, as one person of the Trinity, one part of a triune God. One in three and three in one doesn’t make sense according to our normal number sense. It only makes sense within the nature of God. Jesus’ teachings are […]

“Give us this day our daily bread.”  There it is right in the Lord’s Prayer.  We do not live without sustenance. Is food then a human right? How then do so many go hungry in the world’s richest country? Jesus said those words before the Last Supper, when he forever transformed the meaning of bread […]

This Sunday is Bible Sunday where we will give Bibles to our 3-4th graders. It’s also the week in our Foundations of Faith when we will talk about the Bible as Foundational. In each service, a congregation member will share a favorite Bible passage and explain why it is foundational for them. We’ll also think about […]

We’ve just celebrated the coming of the Christ Child. We have welcomed the gifts of the God-made-Human baby in our midst. And now we hear these words from the book of Matthew, that the baby grew up and told us to become like a child. Different from being childish or being a baby about things, […]

This Sunday is the fourth week of Advent. It seems like it’s Christmas already but we have one more Sunday of preparing the way. There’s one more Sunday in our season of walking slowly, deliberately, and spiritually, or of being reminded of the invitation to slow down. Since Pastor Brad will not be with us, […]

This year, as we prepare for Christmas, we will focus on preparing ourselves and our church for the coming of the Christ child among us one more time. We read the ancient words from Isaiah, quoted by the gospel writers: A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in […]

I visited Lazy F for the first time ever last weekend. I know that must seem crazy to some of you, but I had never been before. I got to see the cross way up on the hill, marvel at the new dining hall, meet Sam and Mazy, the dogs, and give thanks for the […]

As we continue to explore what it means to be a community of belonging, we have to realize that we won’t always agree on everything.  In fact, our church’s history is a history of disagreements, dissolutions, and divisions. There are even disagreements about how to read that history.  We’ll meet some characters from our Wesleyan […]

We all have times in our lives when we don’t feel connected. We have times when something we have done has broken ties with those we’ve loved. We have experiences of being outcast from community. This week, we’ll meet an outcast from Biblical times and we’ll think about times when we’ve felt like an outcast […]