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Can’t Buy It

Think of the hours we spend on food and drink: going to the grocery store, perusing cookbooks and magazines for recipes, being sure the kids have lunch money, grabbing a bottle of water on the way to work, and stopping midmorning for a coffee break.  We eat and...

The Ladder

Unless you’re a painter, roofer, or fire-fighter, you’re probably not on a ladder very often.  From time to time, you use a step stool to reach the top shelf of a tall cabinet or a step-ladder to change a light bulb. A couple of times of year, you get out the...

Cultural/Contextual Trends

At First Baptist Church of Asheville, we’ve been taking a close and hopeful look at the challenges and opportunities we face.  That crucial work continues, and I’ve suggested that, as we do it, we need to keep in mind some pervasive trends which characterize our...

What Are You Doing?

My father believed the old proverb “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”  He didn’t like to see me sitting still, unless it was at the dinner table or in church.  Otherwise, he wanted me to be doing something constructive.  If he didn’t think I was...

God’s Heart is Filled with Love for You

In his compelling and controversial novel, The Testament of Mary, Colm Toibin, imagines how Mary felt while carrying Jesus in her womb:    I know that my own happiness in those first months, when I was with child, felt strange and special, that I lived in a...

Christmas and Terror

Like many other preachers, my sermon yesterday drew, in part, on the terrible story of Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents,” as I attempted to speak about the unspeakable shootings in Newtown, CT.  A young family was decorating their home for...