I pastored a small rural church while I was in seminary. On more than one occasion, I asked directions to go visit someone in the community I didn’t know and I would be told, “Well, they live in the old Turner place.” Come to find out, the Turners had been gone a good thirty years,…
we pass the silver plate of broken bread with less confidence than we pass the peace easier perhaps to hug than to admit our hungerwe take and eat without a word and wait for the wine’s weaker friendshot glasses of salvationwe place the emptiesin the pew racks causing the clicking sound ofsolidarity to rattleour hearts…
We’ve been spending Saturday mornings during Lent with Job at our church: coffee, fruit, pastries, and suffering – what a way to spend a weekend. I’m the discussion leader and the guy who starts the coffee pot, so I get there early to get both the pot and my mind percolating. This morning we looked…
I had a little time to read this afternoon and began Peter Gomes’ book, The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus. The opening quote read: The great principle dominating the composition of Scripture is that of the ascent towards discovery. — Henri Daniel-Rops What is the Bible? A half hour earlier, I was listening to NPR’s Talk…
A friend of mine is taking a song writing class. I talked to her today, interrupting her homework, and she told me her assignment was to write a song full of clichés. The dictionary says a cliché is “a sentence or phrase, usually expressing a popular or common thought or idea, that has lost originality,…
Yesterday, March 2, was my parents’ fifty-fourth wedding anniversary. It was also Texas Independence Day, and the birthday of both of my friends, Todd Lake and Lance Laird. All of those hold significance in my life, but I have to say today, March 3, matters more. It is not a holiday (that I know of)…
Today I worked on a project that was off the menu, if you will, along with the other prep I had to do to get ready for dinner. One of the organizations in Durham that works hard to figure out how to feed and house folks who, for whatever reason, are hungry and homeless is…
The restaurant where I work at Duke serves dinner Monday through Thursday, which means we do our best to run out of everything on Thursday night and we have to recreate most everything on Monday. I go in on Monday mornings (I get there about eleven) and start working my way down the list. Abel,…
there’s a liturgy to our lifethat begins with breakfastcereal, coffee, cinnamon toast some days the invocationis offered by public radioand others we speak ourselves we exchange the readingof our calendars, listing ourobligations and appointments and talk of when we willcome home to one anotheranswering the altar call to return and to rememberour hope is built…
I woke up this morning to news of the earthquake in Chile as I was getting ready to lead a study of the Book of Job at church. And this morning followed last evening, when Ginger and I watched the new Coen Brothers’ movie, A Serious Man, which is their take on Job, set in…