John 15:1-8 Dear Partner in Preaching, I will confess right up front that I find preaching from the Farewell Discourses (John 14-16) seriously challenging. The combination of significant metaphor; a palpable sense of, but nevertheless elusive, original context; and strange mixture of promise, exhortation, and warning have always prompted me to walk – and preach – gingerly when tarrying in this particular portion of John’s Gospel. It feels like the Fourth Evangelist was writing to a community in pain, struggling with their identity in relation to former friends and synagogue members and a host of losses and fears that are...

John 14:1-14 Dear Partner in Preaching, The first line of this familiar passage is so out of kilter with the rest of the passage that it’s almost comical. But if so, it is a poignant, ironic, almost sorrowful humor. Jesus, after all, is preparing his disciples, his friends, for his departure. He knows this will be incredibly challenging for them and so begins with words intended to bring comfort – “do not let your hearts be troubled” – but that seem to fall short of the mark. The disciples’ hearts are troubled, very troubled. And so they ask questions. Have you ever noticed that? That when we are struggling to make sense of...

Dear Partner in Preaching, The story of Thomas has always been one of my favorites. Of course, it’s not just a story about Thomas. It’s also a story about frightened disciples. So scared, in fact, that, they hid behind locked doors. And who can blame them? They had just witnessed the one they confessed to be the Messiah betrayed by one of his own, tried and convicted by both religious and civil authorities, and then brutally executed. Little wonder they were afraid, assuming that the next step would be to round up Jesus’ followers. But when Jesus comes on the scene, their fear falls away and is replaced by joy. This, I think, is the...

I love big questions. Questions about meaning, existence, purpose. I love big questions. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that I believe I can answer them, just that I love struggling with them. 🙂 That wasn’t always the case, though. When I was a freshman in college and looking at required courses, I shied away from the intro. to philosophy course because I couldn’t imagine spending all my time trying to answer questions to which there are no answers. As a tribute – or, I suppose, a critique, depending on your point of view (though I mean it as a tribute 🙂 ) – to my liberal arts education at Franklin & Marshall College,...

Best known, perhaps, as the cohost of PBS’s long-running Sneak Previews (later changed to Siskel and Ebert and the Movies), Roger Ebert was many things. The first Pulitzer Prize winning film critic, he was also a profound commentator on culture and politics, an incredibly astute observer of human nature and, ultimately, a candid memoirist and cataloguer of the human spirit. His very well written autobiography, Life Itself, began with this wonderful metaphor drawn from his lifelong love affair with film: I was born inside the movie of my life. The visuals were before me, the audio surrounded me, the plot unfolded inevitably but not...