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“You’ve Got to Carry That Weight” Matthew 10:37-42 A Sermon for First Church or Christ, Congregational East Haddam, Connecticut July 2, 2017 When it comes to the stories of our faith, there’s not a Sunday that goes by that we don’t start in the middle of
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I know. It’s Tuesday. Suffice it to say there has been a lot going on. I’m still looking at sight and the way Jesus healed blind people. Bruce Corley was one of my New Testament professors in seminary. I loved his classes. He began our discussion of Jesus’
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One of the things I keep coming back to as I read through the miracle stories of Jesus is how little we know beyond the moment of healing. We rarely know names or back stories. We are not told what things were like a week, or a year, or a
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Last Monday night, as I finished my post, I did what I have done every other week—looked over the list of Jesus’ miracles that I found on someone’s website and picked one for the following week so I could think about it. What caught my attention was now
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When I look back and try to remember the first time I heard certain Bible stories, I realize how many of them were told to me as if they were fables—stories with a point. There seemed to always be someone in the story to emulate and someone who showed
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I didn’t write last week because I was listening. Ginger and I spent the week in San Antonio at the Festival of Homiletics, or Preacher Geek Camp, as Ginger likes to call it. The week was inspiring, challenging, and invigorating. I came back with both my mind and my
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Mark 5:21-43; Luke 8:40-56; Matthew 9:18-26 From time to time, my father’s words come floating back to the surface unexpectedly. Each time I feel more grateful that it happened. This week, as I thought about the story of these two people who came separately to Jesus,
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I have had an interesting journey—actually, three—with this miracle over the past days. The first, I suppose, is the expected, or at least obvious, one: what exactly happened? Here’s a story told in all four gospels(Matthew 14:13-21, Mark 6:30-44, Luke 9:12-17, John 6:
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On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to
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When I look back over the life of this blog, it seems I grow silent in Eastertide. Part of the reason, I am sure, is the recoil from keeping my Lenten Journal and writing straight for forty-something days and nights. I don’t know all the reasons, or that they
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The past few days I have been captured by James Carroll’s book, Christ Actually: Reimagining Faith in the Modern Age, in which Carroll articulates what faith in Christ looks like in the light of the Holocaust. He begins with a question Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to a friend: “What keeps
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I spent part of my day working from a window seat at The Marketplace, a wonderful coffee shop-café-grocery store that sits on the edge of the Guilford Town Green, which is renowned as the largest town green in New England (almost eight acres) and was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead,