Recent Blog Posts

12/01/2024 - Advent Week One: Hope as Defiance During World War II, Japanese Americans in internment camps launched a quiet rebellion - not with weapons, but with vegetable gardens, poetry, and baseball leagues. Through their story of creating beauty behind barbed...

11/24/2024 - Hope & Humility: Part Eight - Not From Here As we prepare for Advent, the lectionary wants us to be thinking about the nature of kingship. The Jewish people had a long, checkered history with kings. In Jesus, they would find a King whose Kingdom was...

11/17/2024 - Hope & Humility: Part Seven - Labor Pains Through the parallel stories of Hannah's prayer at Shiloh (1 Samuel 1:4-20) and Jesus' prophecy about the temple's destruction (Mark 13:1-8), this message explores how God's kingdom emerges not through...

11/10/2024 - Hope & Humility: Part Six - Intermissions of Light in the Darkness TThis Sunday we discussed two stories in Mark chapter 12: the greatest commandment, and the widows offering. These stories represent light, joy, and hope in the midst of a dark...

11/03/2024 - Hope & Humility: Part Five - All Saints, Elections, and Sacred Citizenship Today's "All Saints Sunday" message reminds us that we belong to something far greater than our current political moment – the communion of saints, a wild and beautiful...

10/27/2024 - Hope & Humility: Part Four - The Blind Man Who Sees This Sunday we dove into the story of blind Bartimaeus in Mark chapter ten. Sometimes this seems like a simple story of a healing, but it turns out there's more Bartimaeus than we first realized. He...

10/20/2024 - Hope & Humility: Part Three - From Bias to Breakthrough What can two of Jesus' more impulsive disciples teach us about overcoming our biases? Today's message explores how challenging our assumptions can transform our faith, our politics, our...

10/13/2024 - Hope & Humility: Part Two - The Center In Mark chapter 10, Jesus is approached by a man who wants eternal life. He has faithfully lived the commandments, but Jesus asks him to sell everything, give it to the poor, and follow him. The story is often...

10/06/2024 - Hope & Humility: Part One - Faithful Dissent What can Job's resilience and Jesus' unexpected stance on divorce teach us about faithful, Christlike civic engagement in today's polarized world? Discover how these two stories challenge our modern...

9/29/2024 - The Book of James The book of James??? Description: as we conclude our September study of the book of James, we look at both the beginning and the end of the letter. As we do, so, we are confronted by two questions: (1) How important is a name? And (2)...