The word Easter is shorthand for God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. That simple incredible claim is the center of our Christian hope. It’s the center because it reminds us who God is, who we are and that God’s future will prevail despite every refusal and rebellion. Easter brings to the front of our mind and the center of our heart that, only God is God. God is the forever center that holds. Easter reminds us dramatically that when it’s God’s will, you can betray it, arrest it, whip…

“Crucifixion ain’t no fiction,” said a 90’s rap group. As followers of Jesus, we agree. The Crucifixion of a man named Jesus from Nazareth is a historical fact. It was the public lynching of a man who stood at the intersection of politics and religion and spoke of God and neighbor. For his words and his work, a politician ordered his destruction to appease the faith community. This grotesque spectacle climaxed on a garbage dump outside the city walls while his mother watched. No fiction. It would be awful enough…

If happiness is lavender, then joy has to be purple. Why purple? Because you make purple out of red and blue. Love and sorrow. Joy lives at that intersection of heartbreak and ecstasy. Joy doesn’t live alone; she has four roommates, faith, hope, wonder and gratitude. They need one another. Each leads to the other. Scripture tells us joy is: a gift, an incentive, a companion, a response and a reward. So joy is in us, for us, with us and will come through us. As we make our way…

How we stand for truth has everything to do with the truth we stand for. For us, the most true thing in the universe is God! With the most true thing about God being that “God is love.” We know that it’s impossible to actually love God without loving neighbor. These two ideas are inseparable and irrefutable. Our living out of these two truths is not contingent on the behavior of others. The love Jesus modeled is inconvenient and as we attempt to live it out we’ll often feel maladjusted…

Putting Jesus at the center of your life is learning how to love as God loves, which involves a willingness to sacrifice our preferred ways and outcomes in favor of Jesus’ way and his preferred outcomes. Spiritually, we haven’t grown up until we want God’s way more than we want our way! Life and relationships are so hard often because the love we have been taught and practice is fearful, thin, and fragile. No wonder it disintegrates when faced with resistance or enemies. But when we decenter ourselves and choose…

What to do when God is silent, goes the question. But maybe what is really being said here is, ‘God is not speaking to me in a fashion that is convenient or dramatic enough to address my anxieties and hardships.’ Being the anxious creatures that we are, we might be conflating the idea of God’s silence with God’s abandonment or God’s nonexistence. But, as we get to know God, we learn that silence is really a language for God. A means of communication. And if that is true, then, a…

Self-examination means we pause and check-in with our soul. And we ask our soul two questions: What are my patterns? And, do they increase well-being? Ultimately the practice of self-examination is a gift because it moves us from blindness to gaining new sight. Recent laundry commercials tell us about something called nose blind – where we smell a smell so often we get used to it and cease to be able to detect or describe it no matter how odorous. Self-examination invites us to consider the possibility of what we…

God being near is how it all gets started and is sustained. God was near to Jesus at his baptism, near enough to whisper the words “beloved” and the affirmation “pleased.” God wanted new nearness to Jesus so God directed him through Spirit to the soul-making crucible of “wilderness.” And though Satan was in the wilderness with the wild beasts, so were angel companions. God’s nearness, more often than not, doesn’t eradicate hardship, it uses it for some new faithful resolve. Did you notice after the arrest of Jesus’ cousin…

Before St. Paul begins his best-known chapter – the one about love, 1 Corinthians 13 – he finishes the 12th chapter with this, “I will show you a more excellent way.” Given all of the division and vitriol that has become a normalized part of life, we might need to pause and ask ourselves a couple of questions, do I really believe that love is the more excellent way? And if we really do, what is love’s cost for me right now? The people many of us venerate from Jesus…