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.”