Rev. Don Erickson

Do you know what the shortest verse in the Bible is? It certainly isn’t one that you could have memorized in your Sunday school classes; it would have been way too easy, at least for most. It is in John 11 and in the story of the resurrection of Lazarus. As Jesus finally arrived to the tomb of a now four-day-old dead Lazarus, he saw the deep sorrow of Martha and Mary Martha Magdalene and the Jews in the village, and in a deep moment of empathy and humanity, verse 35 simply says “Jesus wept.” In this small verse of just two word is found the profound beauty of the Christian faith and practice. December 26, 2004, a Tsunami in southeast Asia ravaged with waves, destroying whole towns and took thousands upon thousands out to sea, never to return. Included in these thousands upon thousands was a friend. Just four years before the Tsunami, in February of 2001, my wife Holly and I vacationed at a small beach resort in the southern Thailand in a beach town called Khao Lak. Holly’s first c...

These are troubling times, that’s for sure. Putting a pretty face on it will not change the reality. Like our ancestors before us, we are faced with a daunting situation that forces us to live our lives a little differently. Okay, maybe a great deal differently. I’ve found myself remembering my ancestors a lot these days. A few years ago, I did a genealogical study of my family background. Maybe some of you have. It was fun and intriguing on many levels. It was also rather surprising. There has always been talk in my family about Jewish ancestry. On both sides. My genealogical study did not find clear documentation of Jewish ancestry on my father’s side. That my paternal grandfather was adopted early in his life makes such clarity hard. That said, it is clearly possible. It was easy to document Jewish ancestry on my mother’s side. My great-grandmother, my maternal grandfather’s mother, family name was Nawrocki, a clear Jewish name in Poland. It means convert. So Nawrocki’s were...

from my book A Life Lived & Laid Down for Friends: A Progressive Christology ( Wipf & Stock, 2019 ) In this rather long chapter, we will be discussing Jesus’ interaction with a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well. It is well-known story from the gospel of John. Instead of including the long passage from the Gospel of John 4, I invite you all to get out your Bibles like you would in an old-school Baptist church and turn to gospel of John, chapter 4, and read verse 3-42. And after you do so, return to this chapter and let us delve deep into this story of Jesus’ intriguing conversation with the Samaritan woman.   Well-Water Talk As the story goes, Jesus is traveling from Judea in the south to his home in Galilee in the north. In between Judea and Galilee is Samaria. Weary from his sojourn, he stops mid-way in the city of Sychar in Samaria. Sychar is significant because on the outskirts of the city is Jacob’s Well which Jacob himself dug. Jesus sat aside the well and r...