The Pharisee valued fasting and giving tithes, but could not find value in his fellow sinner.
God is not a tool in our hands. He does not exist to serve our goals, our metrics, or our platforms.
The gospel isn’t for the strong but people who know they aren’t.

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The instrument of execution has been changed into an emblem of peace--a hawk become a dove, a sword hammered into a plowshare. Now every time God sees His bow, He who never forgets will nevertheless remember His oath never to draw it again to punish the earth by a cosmopolitan flood.
But there’s more to this movie than excellent Lego graphics and artistic; in other words, imaginative storytelling.
As I peer back over the years between the me-then and the me-now, I see one striking similarity. I am always a man who forgets who he really is, because I’m always focused on becoming the man I want others to think I am.
In Sunday morning Bible study, our class is reading 1st Peter. This week was chapter 3 and I’ve always had a challenge with the imagery there. I’m talking about the way Peter brings Noah into the picture and connects it to Christian suffering.
I sin more in thirty minutes than those of the “victorious Christian life” supposedly sin in thirty years.
An understanding and appreciation of the goodness (and given-ness) of place and family, and the vocations attending each, can of course be taught and learned in a classroom or by means of a book.
The thing is, not only is fixing our past impossible; who’s to say we wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes? In fact, who’s to say we wouldn’t make matters even worse?
In the pageant of Easter Week, Maundy Thursday speaks about the last time Jesus ate with his Disciples and how He washed their feet in preparation for participating in the Passover meal (John 13).
Waits wants to pen the songs with beautiful melodies and lyrics dark as sin. Whatever his church background, he sings “the big print giveth, and the small print taketh away."
I am lord of all I eat. I lord it over meat, potatoes, pecan pie. I make those foods serve my body, transforming them into me. But it is not so with the meal of Jesus.
What we confess concerning a corpse confesses much about how deep, or how shallow, is our understanding of the importance of the incarnation of Jesus, his death, and his (as well as our own) resurrection.
The concept of Theology as science is foreign to our ‘enlightened’ century where the subject has been removed to the Liberal Arts category.