I spent Monday through Wednesday of this week at a United Methodist conference in Dallas, Texas.  As a lot of you know, that's the city of my birth, childhood, and adolescence. One of the first things I did on this trip -- as I do every time on those rare occasions I...

Over the past several years,  I have, thankfully, emerged out of a fog of cynicism. I went through a season where I was so frustrated with the actions of people who described themselves as mature Christians that I almost threw out the notion of mature Christianity...

I just finished reading Frederick Buechner's The Remarkable Ordinary: How To Stop, Look, And Listen To Life. Buechner is a Princeton grad, Presbyterian pastor, essayist, novelist, and occasional preacher.  He just turned 92 and so is not turning out much new material,...

Yesterday's message ... Introduced the squirm-in-your-seat concept of a "sexual audition" from Esther 2; Meditated on both the nature of the bible -- why such a story in holy writ? -- and the activity of God -- does he cause stuff, respond to it, or something else...

So there's a beauty: Esther. And there's bleh: her life situation, her predicament, her enemies. Why have both synagogue and church always included such a sordid, "godless," story in their Scriptures?  What does Esther 2 have to say to us in 2018. Quite a lot.  It's a...

With some frequency, our Next Step Membership Workshop will involve an experiment. A Methodist experiment.   And while the people in the class change, the results of the experiment rarely do. Here it is.  At the beginning of our third evening together, I ask the...

Way back in the spring of 1984, as I was winding up my English degree in college, I took a class on theories of literary interpretation.  It sounds kind of high falutin', and I suppose it was. The teacher was Louis Menand, who has gone on to a measure of fame as...

We’ve all seen these: And what’s inside most of those illustrated children’s bible tends to be a much-sanitized version of the real thing. By making Scripture palatable to pre-schoolers and pre-teens, we rob it of its wildness and unpredictability. Sometimes what you...

Yesterday's message ... Started a series on a book that I have avoided for 28 years:  Esther; Continued a recent trend of devoting July to overlooked sections of the Old Testament; in 2014 it was "Lost & Found" from I Kings 17-19; in 2015 it was "On The Up And Up"...

What if we told you that there is a book in the bible in which God is never even mentioned? Not once. Did the writer omit God’s name from the script on accident? Or was it intentional? This summer, we’re looking at the book of Esther. A book where God is more producer...