My mother, a fourth grade teacher and Senior High Sunday School Teacher, upheld language rules. When I was in middle school, one of dad‘s younger brothers came to visit and cursed at the table. Mom joked about needing to wash out his mouth with soap. Uncle Dave, feeling himself, smiled and repeated the foul word […]
Tag Archives: Bible
I was 11 years old and my church league basketball team was playing Immanuel Baptist. Immanuel had this tall kid, Big 33, who I was supposed to guard. We couldn’t stop him. Between the quarters, our coach, let’s call him Coach Rupp, pulled me to the side and laid out a detailed plan that involved […]
In 1976, I found myself in the summer school reading program. One of the few perks of summer school was representing Lexington Fayette Urban County Public Schools in Lexington’s Fourth of July parade. They asked us to dress as our favorite character from American history. I knew I wanted to dress as a Native American. […]
I love VBS, I guess the first time I ever taught or preached was for Mrs. Wells’ 4th grade VBS class as a 12 year old Moses with a bathrobe, an elastic banded gray beard, two tablets fashioned from spray painted kickboards and a memorized script! Our scriptures today and next week are the lessons […]
What has nourished you? What has carried you to this place where you now stand? If I was to think of a symbol of what fed me as a child, I could place a mason jar of homegrown green beans on the altar. Every summer, we picked bushel baskets of beans at the family farm, […]
I’ve always loved watching a campfire, how the flames dance up into the night sky. In the Biblical age, fire provided any light at night, made possible every cooked meal, kept people warm, and forged pottery or metal. As a child hearing the Pentecost story, I got lost in the wonder of the tongues of […]
Sometimes you’ll pick up a scholarly article or a legal contract and it will begin with a glossary defining unfamiliar words or technical terms. Some words like love or hate may be used so widely that knowing just what someone means when they say “I love that” is not that clear. If you tried to […]
Last Tuesday, after what we church workers call Easter Monday, I looked at my sermon text and I wondered why I laid out a sermon series rooted in First John. Unlike most of the Bible, First John does not tell a story, at least not in a traditional sense with a storyline, plot, and characters. […]
Last Wednesday, Hunter, Sol, Mercede and I worked on building an irrigation path to divert groundwater away from a home and towards a catch basin. There was not a nice stack of matching concrete pavers from Home Depot but instead a pile of preindustrial stones collected from nearby fields. Each rock had its own size, […]
Mark tells no back stories: no theological images like John, no genealogy like Matthew, and no birth narrative like Luke. Mark begins with John the Baptist. Jesus was about 30 years old, the age when many men got married, when he decided to travel to the Judean wilderness to hear John the Baptist preach. John […]
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