Lectionary Readings: Year A, Proper 13 I’d like to tell you a story about a young seminarian. Many seminaries around the country require a hospital chaplaincy to graduate. The hospital this seminarian ended up at was a large urban hospital – a Level 1 trauma center. It was the hospital that dealt with major accidents,…
There once was a ruler of a nation who erected a large golden statue of himself. At the unveiling and dedication of this statue, important political figures in the nation, the governors, the spiritual and political advisers, the judges and magistrates, and many others, came to show their support of this marvelous statue. These people…
Today is Trinity Sunday. It’s the Sunday where we celebrate the mystery of the Trinity, the Godhead, the Three in One and One in Three. It’s something that has caused quite a bit of confusion among a lot of people for many years. Because the Trinity is not exactly a simple concept to wrap our brains around.
God the Father is God, but is not the Holy Spirit, and is not Jesus. Jesus is God, but is not the Father and is not the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit is God, but is neither the Father, nor the Son. The three are one God, and yet also, distinctly three.
If you’re one of those people who hears that and says, “Oh yeah, that makes perfect sense. No problems here,” then I applaud you. The rest of Christendom, however, has spent quite a bit of time trying to explain this mystery in a way that makes sense, and in a way that all parties can agree on.
The Jesuit mystic, Anthony de Mello said, “If you want to know what it means to be happy, look at a flower, a bird, a child; they are the perfect images of the kingdom. For them live from moment to moment in the eternal now with no past and no future. So they are spared the guilt and the anxiety that so torment human beings and they are full of the sheer joy of living.”
You might be surprised to know that there were over 50,000 Christian denominations in the world in 2025. That number is expected to grow to 64,000 by 2050. What’s even more interesting is that the number of people becoming Christians is slowing down, but the number of new denominations is rising. What that means is that we are making new denominations at a faster rate than we’re making new disciples. You might think, “Oh, that’s an easy fix! We’ll just start new churches and make them non-denominational.” Unfortunately, I’ve got news for you. For at least the last 25 years, the growth rate of making new denominations is already faster than the rate of new Christian congregations. That means, quite often: New church, New denomination. And why not? You won’t have to answer to anyone, or be involved in a larger community.
Lectionary Readings: Year A – Sixth Sunday in Easter One of the things my friends and I in college liked to do was to use fake church names that let people know that rather than going to church we instead decided to stay at home. You’ve probably heard a bunch of these. “Oh yeah, today…
Where Would You Rather Be?
Lectionary Readings: Year A – Proper 14 In the movie Jaws, there’s a scene where Martin Brody, the sheriff in town is sitting on the back of the boat, throwing out chum into the water, hoping that they’ll be able to attract the shark that they are hunting. He’s absent-mindedly talking to the ship’s captain…
Read More