Think bigger. Those are the words that surprised me when I spoke them to a group of youth. I was talking about how God can actually change our lives through prayer and use us to have an impact on other people. I meant for them to think bigger about themselves as well as the way…

“Religion dry as dust will never do.” Dry as Dust That’s the opening line of a sermon from a famous preacher of the mid-twentieth century by the name of Harry Emerson Fosdick. Fosdick was, during World War II, the pastor of what we would now call a mega-church, a Protestant, non-denominational congregation known as Riverside…

You may or may not be familiar with the old hymn, “Beneath the Cross of Jesus” (you can listen to it here). As Christians, we all live beneath the cross of Christ. But what does that mean? I believe it means that the cross influences our lives in profound ways, ways that distinguish us from…

One of the things we consistently hear from Olympic athletes, no matter what the sport, is that there’s nothing like the roar of the crowd. The terrifying, pressure-filled experience of being in the center of the stadium is instead encouraging as teammates and others cheer them on. And that’s a part of what the writer…

Three men essentially created the foundation for what we know as English church music: two Germans, Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederic Handel; and one Englishman, Henry Purcell. George Frederic Handel became a British citizen in the mid-1600’s, in essence adopting England as his adult country and from there writing the Messiah. We thank God…

As we discussed in the previous post, from our earliest days, we know what it’s like to be excluded. Some of us spend too much of our lives trying to be included in whichever group is important to us. And far too often, that exclusive group is the church. But that’s not the church as…

Do you remember when you were a kid? One of the most difficult times was when you were on the playground, and you were going to play a game, and so you decided to choose up teams. Do you remember? There were always two people, two captains who were supposed to choose their teams. And…

I’ve heard the Magnificat, the Song of Mary in Luke 2:46-55, for decades. And the tendency with any familiar passage is to let it roll over your head and therefore fail to wrestle with its content or its import. I confess I’ve often had that attitude with this one. But when I sat down, opened…

In my last post, we discussed living out the mission of Luke-Acts in today’s world and ended with a quote from Robert Heaney, “Mission is, in fact, not defined by us. Mission is defined by God.” Spirit-filled Cosmos But to live in a way that somehow looks like God’s mission, we must consider the “spirit-filled…

Every time I come to the Collect for St. Luke the Evangelist, I feel like it in some ways it not only lays out something that’s important, but it also gently takes me by the front of my shirt and says, “Come on, you can do this, too.” A Continuing Ministry What do I mean?…