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  This Thanksgiving, I’m reminded again of Helen at the assisted living center who regularly tells me she hates her life and wants to die. From a pragmatic standpoint, it doesn’t really help that Helen doesn’t believe in a God who loves her- a God, in short, to Whom one might give thanks. Recently, though,…

This past Sunday I had the joy and privilege of joining in worship with the people of Old First Presbyterian in downtown San Francisco.  The following sermon belongs to our ongoing series, Jesus Epithets:  All the Names Jesus Gets Called in Scripture, and takes as its inspiration John 11:17-27 and Isaiah 65:17-25. When Jesus arrived,…

If you hear less from me over the next ten days, it is because I’ll be mostly vacationing with family and friends first in Albuquerque and San Francisco, and then, sans children, in Napa Valley.  I’m still trying to figure out whether I should even take my lap top.  As much as I love you…

This weekend our family’s Friday movie night featured Chicken Run, an animated comedy directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park which tells the story of one group of cooped-up chickens and their relentless thirst for freedom from their soulless, money-grubbing overlords, the Tweedys.  The chickens’ ringleader is Ginger, an independent, no-nonsense hen constantly hatching (pun intended)…

Resurrection is on my mind this week as I prepare to preach tomorrow on the passage from John 11, where Jesus in raising Lazarus from the dead describes Himself as “The Resurrection and The Life.” Maybe this is why the British band Keane’s single, “Silenced by the Night,” from their latest album, Strangeland, moved me this…

We were driving home from school during Holy Week last year when I put the question before my then four-year-old son.  “Do you know what happens this weekend?,” I had asked him- and I’d be lying to say I had no expectation about how he would respond.  Surely, I had figured, all those bedtime Bible…

In recent days, Diana Butler Bass and Andrew Sullivan (in a Newsweek cover story, “Forget the Church, Follow Jesus”) have both given expression to some angst about the death of the church.  Bass has gone on to hold out the possibility for a “resurrected Christianity.”  This Christianity, she argues, one that she catches glimpses of…

“You’ve been given the gift of knowing the secrets of the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus replied, “but they haven’t been given it.  Anyone who already has something will be given more, and they will have plenty. But anyone who has nothing- even what they have will be taken away!  That’s why I speak to them…

I recently finished a wonderful, little book by Yale historian Carlos Eire. The book lives up to its name: it manages to cover in relative brevity the breathtaking expanse of “eternity” from its very first beginnings in antiquity to its life (or lack thereof) in the present.  As the offspring of Eire’s involvement in a…

“Thank you for resurrecting me,” she stammered, a crooked smile breaking out across her face.  “Merry Christmas.” A moment of lucidity.  Then she was back in her own world, her eyes beholding some distant shoreline, her mutterings only understandable to some imaginary friend, and her expressions those of one sometimes confused, sometimes afflicted. She had…
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