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The Beautiful Gospel

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The task of the church in this ugly and brutal machine age is to tell the gospel story as beautifully as possible. Beauty will save the world. – Brian Zahnd One of my favorite words is beauty. God and beauty to me go together. One defines the other. For this reason, I sometimes begin a prayer by calling to “Beautiful God.” In some ways, beauty and God are one and the same thing. Pope John Paul II, in 1962 before he was pope and was Karol Wojtyla, wrote a whole treatise on this truth. He wrote, “we can say God is beautiful. That means, God is beauty. Everything found in the concept of beauty is found in God.” Of course, the beauty being referred to here is not surface level. Gorgeous or pretty are not synonyms for the beauty I’m talking about. The beauty I talk about is spiritual in nature. Beauty begins with the breath of God, the breath that gave way to Creation. Where there is this kind of beauty, there is God. And the opposite holds true. Where the spirit of beauty is lacking, God ...
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A Pastoral Tribute to Magic & Bird

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March Madness has begun for both the men and women’s game. Are you watching? Excited? This time of year is simply amazing. Basketball everywhere. And Baseball in the wings. This morning I’d like to do something a little different. It’s been a tough week. We’ve hosted a few memorials the past couple weeks, and the grief heavy to bear. I’d like to do something lighter, related to March Madness. Call it an ode to basketball using the vehicle of two iconic players. This is a Christian tribute to Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. You might ask, how could a tribute to Magic and Bird be Christian? Are the two Christian exemplars and we didn’t know it? Not exactly. But I strongly feel that there are Christian lessons to learn all around us, if you look close enough. This includes sports. In fact, sports are a great place to look. Sports is a  human endeavor, after all. And Paul himself pointed to athletics as indicative of the human life. I Corinthians 9:24 - " Don’t you know that all the run...
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The Two Wings of a Bird Called Love

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Maybe you’ve heard about it. But empathy is a sin. That is according to some so-called conservative Christians. Empathy as a sin is a thing. A couple books have been written about it, one called the Sin of Empathy by a professor at a Christian college and seminary. The other is called Toxic Empathy by Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative columnist. Elon Musk recently quoted the ideas of another thinker, Gad Saad, who claims empathy is a weakness in Western civilization. Saad, now finishing a book titled Suicidal Empathy, describes himself as culturally Jewish, but otherwise an atheist. As for his academic background, his expertise and PhD is in marketing. Nonetheless, the two Christians I mentioned above agree with Saad, an atheist, that empathy is a sin. When you delve deeper into their words, however, you quickly find out their critique of empathy is mostly bluster and, well, marketing. Their critique is really of empathy taken too far which they of course exaggerate. Empathy, if taken...
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Wealth, Power, Freedom

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These three temptations we read about this time of year and have known about for so long, what are they all about? We know what they are in the narrative sense. It’s pretty clear what the deceiver is doing. He is trying to pull Jesus to the dark side, to his side. Turn stones into bread. Worship me and be given all that you see. Throw yourself down and you’ll be saved. Jesus sees through the play, the ploy, the plot! Bread alone doesn’t a good life make. Idols of any kind leads nowhere; only the way of God is worthy. Testing God means the test-maker failing every time. But is there something deeper going on here than meets the eye? Are these 3 temptations as simple as they seem? Of course not. The Bible has been a bestseller for centuries for a reason. There’s so much nuance, so much depth, so much going on beneath the surface, all of which makes great literature great and meaningful. Such depth is good for the spirit as well. So ...
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The Transfiguration: Jesus's Enlightenment Experience

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Have you ever been to a mountaintop? Have you ever had a mountaintop experience where you reached some important peak and in the process things become clearer and lighter and brighter? Jesus’s mountaintop experience has its own Sunday. It comes just before Lent every year. Of course, I’m talking about the Transfiguration which I just shared from in Luke 9. It’s quite a moment! We might call it Jesus’s enlightenment experience. As is often the case, for Jesus, this enlightenment begins with prayer and, I’d like to think, some kind of meditation. The transfiguration happens eight days after Jesus lets his disciples know how all of this will end – with him on a cross. He will deny himself, take up a cross, and lose his life to save. He says follow me in doing that in your own way. The disciples have 8 days to mull this over. Jesus takes Peter and the brothers of thunder, James and John to the top of a mountain. Mount Tabor, scholars believe. As Jesus was praying, something s...
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The Kingdom of God: The John the Baptist Practice

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Something can be two things at the same time. A sunset can be beautiful yet at the same time indicate that a beautiful day is ending. Joy and sadness sometimes move together, like two dancers doing a waltz. Well, the kingdom of God is two things at the same time. It is a reality not to be fully realized until Jesus’s return and it is a present reality inside each of us, able to be realized right here and now, albeit imperfectly.   But what does this mean for our daily lives? That is today’s question. What does the kingdom of God mean for my daily spiritual life? As Christians living this side of Christ’s return, one of our most important tasks is to prepare the way for that return and the Kingdom of God Christ will usher in. We are all John the Baptists, preparing the way for Christ’s return! That we are all John the Baptists preparing the way for the kingdom is key to our answer to how we live the kingdom of God ever day. The practice of baptism is key, but baptism i...
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The Kingdom of God: Heavenly Commonwealth

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In the summer of 2019, after watching all the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe catalog - the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Spiderman, etc - Corey and I attended the long awaited Avengers movie called The Endgame. Seeing that movie with my son stands as one of my fondest memories of fatherhood. Corey calls it a core memory of his childhood. He got that idea of a core memory from another movie, Inside Out. We love movies! The Endgame was one of those movies where the whole crowd stands at the end and cheers. We stood too, laughed, even cried. It's a precious memory, a core memory, that we both cherish. For Christianity, it has its own version of the Endgame. The kingdom of God fully actualized on earth, that is the endgame. That’s what Jesus’ return, his second coming, will bring about. Jesus will return and usher in the kingdom of God, making it a present reality here, a reality that will last an eternity. Jesus’s return. What do I think about this? While many folks believe ...
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