Ben Witherington is best known as a deeply thoughtful and engaging New Testament scholar from Asbury Theological. Recently, however, his more profound witness has been as the father of Christy, his 32 year old daughter who died unexpectedly on January 11. As we prepare to discuss what death means in the life of a Christian, I hope you will read his 3-part reflection on what “good grief” has looked like in his life:
part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Do you remember all the things your mother said you shouldn’t discuss at the dinner table? Well, we are talking about all of them, and adding a few to the list.  In advance of each week’s sermon, I’ll be posting daily (or so) links to resources that have helped me think like a Christian on the week’s topics.

This week is on money, and here’s my guarantee: you get a sermon all about money, but not a word of it will be about giving to the Church. We will be talking about living lives free from the fear or the worship of money. And there’s no better place to begin that John Wesley’s sermon “On Money”, which gives us his famous 3 rules of Christian finance:

Earn all you can; save all you can; give all you can. 

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What is The Lectionary?

The lectionary is a series of suggested scripture readings for specific days of the year. There are weekly and daily lectionaries, and they may range in length from one to six years.

United Methodist pastors generally use The Revised Common Lectionary, a three-year lectionary created by an ecumenical group called the Consultation on Common Texts. The lectionary includes three Bible readings for every Sunday, plus readings for special holy days. Pastors may focus on one of the readings or all three during the service.

Do you remember all the things your mother said you shouldn’t discuss at the dinner table? Well, we are talking about all of them, and adding a few to the list.  In advance of each week’s sermon, I’ll be posting daily (or so) links to resources that have helped me think like a Christian on the week’s topics.

Brian Bantum is smart, and I was blessed to have him as a teacher when I was in seminary. As we continue to think about racial identity, I hope you’ll take time to read this letter to his son on what it means, theologically, to be “multi-racial.”

If being post-racial means anything, perhaps it is this: that we are always at home, and we are never home. If being a Christian means anything, it is that we are always at home, and we are never home, and because of this, the exclusion and the refusals we so often endure are never the entirety of our lives.

Do you remember all the things your mother said you shouldn’t discuss at the dinner table? Well, we are talking about all of them, and adding a few to the list.  In advance of each week’s sermon, I’ll be posting daily (or so) links to resources that have helped me think like a Christian on the week’s topics.

This week’s sermon is on race, and it is convenient that Gene Marks sparked a small internet storm with his article “If I were a poor, black kid.“ I thought the best response came from Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic, which resonated with with a couple of Christian themes in my mind:

This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding race in this country

As Christians, we have a saying about this. We call it the “Golden Rule.”

If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity. The first rule is this–You are not extraordinary.

 

As Christians, we have a practice for this. We call it “Confession.”

Do you remember all the things your mother said you shouldn’t discuss at the dinner table? Well, we are talking about all of them, and adding a few to the list.  In advance of each week’s sermon, I’ll be posting daily (or so) links to resources that have helped me think like a Christian on the week’s topics.

This week we are talking about politics, and apart from the Scriptures (which we’ll cover in worship on Sunday) we have a lot from the history of Church to help us think about how Christians are political.  Today’s reference is a quote from Origen of Alexandria who taught boldly and brilliantly on what it means to follow Jesus. When early church councils declared the Jesus was “wholly human and wholly divine” or “that God is one God in three persons” they were drawing explicitly from Origen. This passage on Christians and civil government comes from his deeply influential work “Against Celsus,” in which he defended the faith against attacks from a Greek philosopher.

[We obey] the injunction of the apostle, “I exhort, therefore, that first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; for kings, and for all that are in authority;”(1 Tim. ii. 1, 2) and the more any one excels in piety, the more effective help does he render to kings… And we do take our part in public affairs, when along with righteous prayers we join self-denying exercises and meditations, which teach us to despise pleasures, and not to be led away by them.  And none fight better for the king than we do.  We do not indeed fight under him, although he require it; but we fight on his behalf, forming a special army—an army of piety—by offering our prayers to God.

via ANF04. Fathers of the Third Century: Tertullian, Part Fourth; Minucius Felix; Commodian; Origen, Parts First and Second | Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Do you remember all the things your mother said you shouldn’t discuss at the dinner table? Well, we are talking about all of them, and adding a few to the list.  In advance of each week’s sermon, I’ll be posting daily (or so) links to resources that have helped me think like a Christian on the week’s topics.

First up is this video of a discussion between three Christians actively involved in politics: Chuck Colson, Greg Boyd, and Shane Claiborne. If you know anything about these folks, you know that they come from very different perspectives on how Christians should do politics, and it’s fascinating to have them all on the same stage.  It’s long, but excellent, especially because none of these folks is trying to make the news with a soundbite; they are talking to one another, not just at one another.

If you don’t have time to watch a 90 minute video, you can download the edited audio or read the transcript here.

via Three Degrees of Separation on Vimeo.