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Maundy Thursday — take up the basin and the towel
We have plenty of opportunity to replicate the principles of the footwashing in our daily lives:
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Lord, draw us toward you
“Draw us, Lord, toward you, toward your way of self-giving love. Draw us away from all that is not love — from the forces of greed, fear, anxiety, and brutality. In this Lenten experience of so being drawn toward you and away from the powers of the world, may we come to find that new life that is the meaning…
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Living the memory of Christ in the present tense
“The church at Corinth is not called to pious, romantic, goosey religion but simply to practice the memory of Jesus and to let that memory be fully present tense… Christians sort these matters out around Jesus, because we are endlessly seduced by imagining the glory is to be found in our technology, in our brightness, in our achievement, in our…
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Confronting the issues of the American Conservative Church
Yesterday I was in prayer for the American Church. I had read in Mark 11 about Jesus cursing the fig tree and cleansing the Temple, and I was grieved for the Church once again.
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Longing for Passion Week
Last Sunday in worship I realized how long Lent really was, even though I’ve worked to walk through Lent the last several years. The liturgy on Sunday in the Anglican Church amplifies that longing. We don’t sing as many songs. The songs are more “mournful” in a way. Lent gets long and I’m thinking, “Wow! Could we hurry this up?”
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Jesus knows what holds us back
In Mark 10:17-22 we have the story of the rich young man coming to Jesus and asking what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. He finds out that it is more than checking off a pretty good list.
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The way home for the American Church
As surely as there will be messed up theology and practice in the Church, there is a marked way home. Our challenge is to follow it. That’s hard because it’s not the dynamic way. It’s not full of light shows and professional music and polished communicators.
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Being people of the Presence
2 Timothy 3:1–5 (NIV): But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—5 having a form of…
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Living Unafraid
Some thoughts from Walter Brueggemann’s Lenten devotional, A Way Other Than Our Own:
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The continuous lessons of the cross
34 Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. 36 What good is it for someone to gain the whole…
