John 3:1-17 Dear Partner in Preaching, There’s a lot going on in today’s reading from John’s Gospel. And I mean A LOT! This passage, filled with images both familiar and odd, can be a lot to take in. St. Augustine chose an eagle to represent St. John because he felt the theology of the Fourth Evangelist soared so high above the other gospels, but sometimes it reaches heights that can be hard for many of us – both in the pulpit and in the pew – to follow. My guess is that amid the imagery of water and Spirit and the serpent lifted up in the wilderness and all the rest, our hearers’ attention will be drawn to two places in...

While I knew that Abraham Lincoln is credited with establishing Thanksgiving Day as a national holiday, I didn’t know it had previously been the custom of presidents and governors and others to declare “a day of Thanksgiving” on a regularly occasional basis. (That is, they did this regularly, but according to no set calendar.) So in addition to the thanksgiving celebration of the pilgrims we know so well, George Washington twice declared days of national thanksgiving (in 1789 and 1795). John Adams and James Madison did the same on several occasions (though Jefferson never did). While often these days of thanksgiving were declared to...

Believe it or not, this is a more complicated question than one might imagine. On the one hand, those who argue against the proposition point to several key pieces of evidence. First, many if not most of the Founders of the country cannot be described accurately as Christians but as Deists, persons who believe that a benevolent Creator set the world in motion but no longer intervenes in it. Indeed, Washington would never publicly admit to being a Christian and Jefferson was regularly accused of being hostile to Christianity and famously took his scissors to the Bible to cut out any incidences of divine interaction. Further, the United States...