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Dear Friends,  It’s Vacation Bible School week at the church, and we are reminded every year of Jesus’ words to children as recorded in Matthew 19: “Some people brought children to Jesus so that he would place his hands on them and pray. But the disciples scolded them.‘Allow the children to come to me,’ Jesus said. ‘Don’t forbid them, because the kingdom of heaven belongs to people like these children.’ Then he blessed the children and went away from there.” Every year during…

Greetings in Christ’s name! Someone approached me Sunday after worship and said, “I need some ‘how to’ about praying the Psalms.  How exactly do you pray them?”  I don’t know whether there is a right or wrong way, but the way I have prayed the Psalms is to simply read them as my own prayers.  I often read prayers that others have written—some of my favorites are Walter Brueggemann’s books of prayers.  A couple years ago I bought the Notre…

Greetings in Christ’s name!  Sunday morning I mentioned that Eugene Peterson characterized prayer as “Answering God” (the title of one of his books).  He claims that prayer is not first of all our words to God, but rather it is first recognizing and hearing God’s word to us.  Therefore, Peterson asserts that our prayers are primarily answering the God who has first spoken to us.  The first part of prayer, then, is to pay attention to how God is speaking…

Alleluia!  Christ is risen! Next Sunday is Pentecost Sunday, which marks the end of Easter on liturgical calendars.  Pentecost is usually celebrated by Christians as the birth of the church or as the giving of the Holy Spirit to the church.  My preaching text for Sunday is from the 2nd chapter of Acts.  There Luke tells us that the Holy Spirit came upon a group of Jesus’s followers and they began to speak in the languages of other people.  When…

Alleluia!  Christ is risen! It was a pleasure to have members of Northshore Friends Church join us in worship on Sunday and to receive a message from their pastor, Robyn Burns.  Robyn pointed to Ephesians 2 which outlines the lost condition of humanity and then makes a turn with the phrase “but God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with…

Alleluia!  Christ is risen! As you know, keeping the Sabbath is one of the ten commandments and has been a wonderful and important practice for both Jews and Christians for centuries.  The Old Testament is full of reminders and recommendations about Sabbath keeping, and though Jesus sometimes re-interpreted the Sabbath rules which had developed by his day, we have every reason to think that Jesus practiced Sabbath keeping and found the practice life-giving and good.  The word Sabbatical is related…