Becoming a Farmer, Becoming a Christian

Wendell Berry says that there are things about being a farmer which can only be known by farming: living on the land over time, tending to it in season and out of season, watching how the wind sweeps across it, observing how water flows over it, seeing the tracks of...

Jesus’ Love

In yesterday’s sermon, I pondered aloud those lyrical lines about love which the Apostle Paul wrote to the troubled church in Corinth. He described (not defined) what love is like:Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It...

Jesus Here and Now in the Church

At the heart of the Christian faith, there is this irreducible and astonishing claim: roughly 2000 years ago, God came to live among us in the flesh and blood, mind and heart, limits and potentialities of one human being: Jesus of Nazareth. In this one brief life, the...

Prayer Offered at Martin Luther King Jr Breakfast

This past weekend, I was honored to offer the invocation at our community’s prayer breakfast in celebration of the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. To have been asked was a surprise of grace. I grew up in Atlanta, Dr. King’s hometown, during the most intense days...

Prayer: Sorting the Bundle of Life

Prayer is, quite simply and profoundly, being with God. It is speaking and listening in order to know and be known; it is hearing and being heard, as ways of holding and being held. Prayer is more than asking and receiving; it is, as Roberta Bondi has said, “the...

More on the “Christlikeness” of God

Like many other people, I have learned a great deal from the world’s great religions. I have been challenged by the simplicity, focus, and gentleness of many followers of the Buddha, impressed by the devotion and passion of many adherents of Islam, and, of course,...

God is Like Jesus

Christians believe that, in one brief and remarkable life, the life of a first century Galilean Jew named Jesus, we have experienced God more fully than in anything else in creation and more completely than in anyone else in human history.We experience God, to be...

Christmas on the Streets

I was glad when our recent snow melted just enough–and city workers and merchants had shoveled and salted enough–to make narrow walkable trails through downtown. On both the 23rd and 24th, after several days of being cooped-up inside, I took long walks...

Christmas in Next Year Country

In her fine book, Dakota, Kathleen Norris writes about what she has learned from the fierce beauty of that vast stretch of the High Plains which serves as the beginning of the desert West. Sparsely populated, often barren, and frequently harsh, those plains are...