Imagine it, if you can: everyone began that day just as they always had, finding their way to the market, checking in with their family and friends, trying their best to maintain the “normalcy” of their lives with the strain of existence pressing on their shoulders. The hearts of many...
I may have told you all this story from my childhood, so forgive me, but I want to look at a slightly different angle of the experience. Late one Christmas Eve, when I must have been around eight or nine, I snuck out of my bedroom to watch TV in...
Today’s appointed texts are all about vision: who can see, who cannot see, who is healed of sight, who can’t believe that sight has been gained. They are deeply human stories on one hand, and they are stories of the power of God’s grace an another. We begin with Samuel...
“It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves.” John 4:42 A few weeks ago, China’s problems seemed far removed from my life here in Gainesville, Ga. And now, even as I write this homily, I am aware that by the...
https://youtu.be/9guXP4Yy18Q For a long time now, I have kept a practice of having paper and pen on the shelf by my side of the bed. Very often, I wake up in the middle of the night with a sudden thought or random insight, and I need to write it down. ...
By the time I left the office on Thursday afternoon to begin my Sabbath rest, I had three sermons prepared for today and they were all across the board. I had one that was designed to be very light, mindful that this is not my “personal platform” in Hyde Park...
And Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain by themselves. From the outset, the story grips us, and we know something significant is going on. If we’re paying attention, our hearts immediately make the link with another pivotal sacred...
When Lisa and I moved to Georgia from Arkansas for graduate school, we didn’t know anyone. We joined Central Presbyterian Church downtown, and we began preparing for Lisa’s own baptism. I am her godfather! On the day of Lisa’s baptism, we sat down front and I noticed a large banner...
When Archimedes discovered a way to determine the purity of gold by applying the principle of specific gravity, he allegedly exclaimed “Eureka!”, the perfect tense of the Greek verb heuriskein, meaning to find. That is, to his amazement, he had found the solution to his problem. Ever since then, the...
Each time I watch the film Steel Magnolias, I fast-forward from the time Shelby falls down in the kitchen to when they are arriving at the cemetery for her funeral. (If the person next to you doesn’t seem to understand this reference, have mercy on them and invite them to...