“No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth onto an old coat.  The patch will simply pull away from the coat, and you’ll have a worse hole than you started with. People don’t put new wine into old wineskins, otherwise the skins will be split; then the wine will be lost, and the skins will…

“A Canaanite woman from [Tyre and Sidon] came out and shouted,  ‘Have pity on me, son of David!  My daughter is demon-possessed!  She’s  in a bad way!’  Jesus, however, said nothing at all to her.  His disciples came up.  ‘Please send her away!,’ they asked.  ‘She’s shouting after us.’  ‘I was only sent,’ replied Jesus,…

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth.  I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law- a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.'”…

Another disciple said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”  But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” Matthew 8:21,22 This is politically incorrect Jesus at, arguably, His best.  The one thing that every good Jew knew must take precedence even before daily morning prayers…

“If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.  It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.  And if your right eye causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.  It is…

“But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. ‘Get behind me, Satan!,’ he said.  ‘You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.” (Mark 8:33) The bumper sticker at the interminably long red light in front of me this morning, as I was driving the…

The Bible attributes some pretty odd sayings to Jesus.  Over the next days and weeks I will be looking at the strange, sometimes bizarre, often politically incorrect things Jesus reportedly said in the Gospels with a view to understanding a bit more of who He was and how He might be speaking into our lives…

(A sermon delivered to the good people of Stockbridge Presbyterian during the season of Easter…) Today we’ll spend some time in the book of Acts looking at the apostle Paul’s missionary visit to the great ancient city of Athens, Greece and his famous speech there.  But before we do that, let’s recall that up until this point, Paul and…

It is not every day that you hear a story that touches something deep inside of you.  That gives you a taste for “church” that matters. Not “church” as just another social obligation or Sunday morning engagement, but “church” when it is working best, as a circle of saints and sinners having been found by and…

How is this for a riveting opener? I recently went to an exhibit at the Carter Center  displaying former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s jewelry.  Not just any  jewelry, but pins.  And, it really does get more interesting. Apparently, Albright, who under the Clinton administration served as the first female  Secretary of State in U.S.…

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