“Choose your losses or lose your choices.” About this time of the year in 1977 I was called to be the pastor of Pecan Grove Baptist Church, a small rural congregation west of Waco; between Oglesby and Mound, to be more exact. In early May of that year, I was ordained. The church celebrated its…
In some of my writing, I have talked about the ways I think Judas is treated unfairly in the gospels. None of the writers can mention him without reminding everyone that he betrayed Jesus. Thomas is the other disciple that gets misrepresented, I think, more by the generations that followed than by the gospel writers,…
Easter feels like it should be an easier Sunday to preach than it is. The magnitude of the day makes it feels like I should have something big to say, but the reality is the story is quite simple and, in its simplicity, profound. So here’s what I have to say this day. ______________________________ When…
I worked from home today because there wasn’t time to get back from New York and make it to the Maundy Thursday service in Westbrook, where I am interim pastor. I met a friend for coffee and as I was walking home I noticed a crew taking down a dead tree next to the coffee…
Since I get on the train around 5:30 in the morning, most of us riding into New York use the time to sleep–until the train stops at 125th Street, and then we start to move about. Some get their stuff together but stay seated, and others (like me) stand up near the door just to…
Back when we were youth ministers, my friend Burt had a metaphor about relationships (talking to young people about relating to their parents and vice versa) that I have not forgotten. He said building trust was like a savings account: you have to build it up by making small deposits in the way you deal…
Some days I can deal with the world and some days I struggle. Tonight is a struggle. Today I read stories about how many states are pushing legislation similar to Florida’s homophobic (in this case, I think we need to redefine homocidal) “don’t say gay” law and another story about Russian troops carrying mobile crematoria…
One of the stories I have repeated often (and I have a lot of stories I have repeated) is that when my father died one of the first things that crossed my mind was to call those I knew whose fathers had died before mine and say, “I’m sorry. I meant well in what I…
Palm Sunday is a day full of contradictions to me, particularly in the way we observe it as Jesus’ triumphal entry, because I don’t think triumph was a central word in Jesus’ vocabulary. As I read the story again this year, preparing to preach, I saw something I had not seen before, and that was…
Yesterday I got a text from a church friend asking if was home because she had something to drop off. When she came by, she handed me two packages of Disco Chips, self-described as “semi-sweet morsels and edible glitter morsels.” The folks at Nestle have had too much time on their hands during the pandemic….