Posts by tablemanna (Page 22)

The Prodigal Son goes off with his inheritance and blows the whole pile on liquor and sex and fancy clothes until finally he doesn’t have two cents left to rub together and has to go to work or starve to death. He gets a job on a pig farm and keeps at it long enough to observe that the pigs are getting a better deal than he is and then decides to go home. There is nothing edifying about his…

“The parables that are Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ murmuring still have the power to expose the roots of bitterness that dig their way into us whenever we feel that God is too good to others and not good enough to us.  Typically, we want mercy for ourselves and justice for others, but the Lukan parables call for us to celebrate with God because God has been merciful not only to us but to others also, even to those we…

  [youtube=http://youtu.be/YYshjlT0VEM] Jesus are you real? All I do is doubt you, God All I do is love you, God All I do is question you What else can I do? This world was never solid ground The past is coming back around All I do is search for you What else can I do? And when I say I search for you I mean I search for peace I search for hope, I search for love And one day…

If we’re to bear fruit in the future, it would seem we need to spend time tending to the soil in which we root our lives.  Lent is a season for digging around in the roots in order to prepare for the mystery of new life that awaits.  Jesus asked one of his followers “who do you say I am” and it remains central for anyone who seeks to follow Jesus in our day.  We’re digging around in the roots…

It has always caused me to wonder – the lack of fairness about the joy and the crap that happens to people. That happens to me.  I do not believe “what goes around, comes around” any more than I believe that “everything happens for a reason”.  What I do believe is that we have this one life to live and that following Jesus gives this life meaning.  My natural tendency is to try to “make sense” of things that happen…

  Our Lenten worship series is called “who do you say I am?”  Jesus asked this question to one of his followers and it remains central for anyone who seeks to follow Jesus in our day.  This week our worship will focus on Luke 13.1-9 In his weekly blog Dan Clendenin writes about this passage:  “Jesus responds to two stories of sudden and premature death that sound like something from the morning newspaper.  When Pilate slaughtered some Galileans during their religious rituals (a…

  In a passage about the church, Frederick Buechner writes about 12 step groups and says that they are far closer to what Jesus would have intended for the christian community to “be like”.  He says:  “The church often bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the dysfunctional family.  There is the authoritarian presence of the minster – the professional who knows all of the answers and calls most of the shots – whom few ever challenge either because they don’t dare to…

There are moments when the fox visits me and I question whether I ought to have done other things with my life.  If I had made different choices would I be happier today?  Often I am weeping in frustration and deeply disappointed in “the state of things”.   In our passage for Sunday, Jesus names himself as a Hen when the Fox we know as Herod is coming for him.  Herod thought mostly about himself.  Jesus did his best to…

Just then some Pharisees came up and said, “Run for your life! Herod’s on the hunt. He’s out to kill you!” Jesus said, “Tell that fox that I’ve no time for him right now. Today and tomorrow I’m busy clearing out the demons and healing the sick; the third day I’m wrapping things up. Besides, it’s not proper for a prophet to come to a bad end outside Jerusalem. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killer of prophets, abuser of the messengers of God!…

Our Lenten worship series is called “who do you say I am?”  Jesus asked this question to one of his followers and it remains central for anyone who seeks to follow Jesus in our day. We will invite reflection on Jesus each week as we consider each of our scripture passages.  We hope that this series will provide greater clarity about who you say Jesus is. Last week we began by asking “When you think of Jesus, what comes to mind?”  Here is…

“Whoever he was or was not, whoever he thought he was, whoever he has become in our memories since and will go on becoming for as long as we remember him – exalted, sentimentalized, debunked, made and remade to the measure of each generation’s desire, dread, indifference – he was a man once, whatever else he may have been.  And he had a man’s face, a human face.” (from The Faces of Jesus, a Life Story by Frederick Buechner p.…

“Take it or leave it, the face of Jesus is, if nothing else, at least a face we would know anywhere  a face that belongs to us somehow, our age, our culture; a face we somehow belong to.  Like the faces of the people we love, it has become so familiar that unless we take pains we hardly see it at all.  “ from “The Faces of Jesus, A Life Story” by Frederick Buechner p. xi When you think of…