Welcome to Lent

Welcome to Lent. Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox (March 21).  Back up six weeks from Easter, then back up to the Wednesday before, and you have the season of Lent.  Forty days.  (If you are on your game, you know that this time period [...]

Christmas

Here is how our story from the past few weeks ends:  The Jews returned from exile in Babylon after seventy years.  The Persians overran the Babylonians and the Persian king, Cyrus, allowed the Jewish people to return to their homeland.  After much struggle, they rebuilt the temple and the wall surrounding Jerusalem. When the new [...]

Advent Week 4: Babylon

Exile is not just a physical or geographic thing.  Exile is a state of the soul.  It is what happens when you forget your story and who you are.  And the Israelites had forgotten their story. Solomon’s reign, climaxed by the opening of the temple in Jerusalem, was without a doubt Israel’s finest hour.  But [...]

Advent Week 3: Jerusalem

Last week we left Israel with an invitation that represented the totality of the Ten Commandments and all the laws that followed:  God saying to Israel “I liberated you from slavery in Egypt.  Now go and make this happen for others too.”  Did they accept? For the answer to this question, we must fast-forward a [...]

Advent Week 2: Sinai

Today we continue our journey:  The Israelites were living under Egyptian oppression.  They cried out to God, and God heard.  More than that, God did something about it.  He sent a deliverer. Moses was born, and through a bizarre series of circumstances wound up being raised in the palace of Egypt as one of Pharaoh’s [...]

Advent Week 1: Egypt

Welcome back to those of you who may have tuned out when the anti-Richt diatribes started up a couple of months back. Welcome to Advent.  For those of you who need a refresher, Advent is the season that starts on the first Sunday after Thanksgiving and runs through Christmas.  Four Sundays; three full weeks plus [...]

Easter: An End to Death

One of the certainties of life in this universe is that at some point, you will die. Even if medical science figures out a way to prolong human life so that you do not die, the earth will still die at some point in the future.  Either it will get swallowed up inside the sun [...]

Good Friday: The Death of Power

All things are in His hands.  He can do whatever He wants….[but] what He most wants to do cannot be achieved by force.  Helpless baby in the manger, battered man dying on the cross–here is the opposite of the way of force.  Here is the way of love that suffers all the wrong, all that [...]

Palm Sunday: James and John Make a Request

Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him.  “Teacher,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.””What do you want me to do for you?”  he replied. They replied, “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.” “You don’t [...]

Fourth Week of Lent: A Woman at a Well

Now he had to go through Samaria.  So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph.  Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well.  It was about the sixth hour. When a [...]