Category Archives: Messages

Love sometimes requires going out on a limb and advocating for people who are powerless in systems which resist and resent their values being subverted. The task is still immense and continues today – wherever human beings are reduced through systems, prejudices and governments to things, useless or useful. Continue reading →

Persistent faith permeates our thoughts. It consumes us. How can this happen? Verse 8 states that we are to speak the Book of the Law continually and to meditate on it day and night. I don’t know about you but this would require me to turn off the TV, stop playing computer games, and put down the novel I was reading. It sounds to me that persistence takes practice! Continue reading →

Persistent faith permeates our thoughts. It consumes us. How can this happen? Verse 8 states that we are to speak the Book of the Law continually and to meditate on it day and night. I don’t know about you but this would require me to turn off the TV, stop playing computer games, and put down the novel I was reading. It sounds to me that persistence takes practice! Continue reading →

We are not alone as we struggle with diversity of opinion, lifestyle, worship, and politics in our Meeting. We need to ask ourselves what radical visions lead to polarization in our Meeting. Dare we pursue potentially polarizing courses – perhaps related to global climate change, racism, economic injustice, inequalities in education, health care, and due process in the legal system? Can our meeting be both brazenly prophetic and empatheticaly pastoral? Continue reading →

The Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that such statements which pretend to being foundational for faithfulness are at best tent stakes which mark where we are in our faith pilgrimage and the holes left from where they are pulled up when we move on are quickly filled in by the sand which had held them. We are wilderness wanderers and the appropriate role for our Elders is to point a way forward through a constantly changing landscape, not defend where we most recently erected our tents. Continue reading →

Adam Smith argued the philosophical notion that self-interest would lead to moral behavior as perhaps a replacement for Christian morality. Was he right? Continue reading →

So I’m thinking that what Jesus is saying is that whatever the concrete specifics of our prayers may be, the crucial thing is to pray that our hearts be aligned with God’s heart, and that what we seek as the “answer” to our needs be inwardly formed by the Holy Spirit. Continue reading →

At different times, in different circumstances we all may be and often are called to tryout different roles, identities, patterns of behavior some of which feel “tried and true” or even immutable not only for the sake of growing in our own discipleship, but to invite others — even or especially others who may seem perfectly happy with a privileged role they’ve got — to become more fully who they are in Christ, and to live more fully into the ministry to which Christ calls them. Continue reading →

,,,I rather like the idea that it is all the extraneous materials, the impurities if you like, which when added to melted sand turn crystal clarity to milky opalescence and which add colors to the glass. Continue reading →

Curly the quintessential cowboy asks: Do you know what the secret of life is? The city slicker Mitch answers “No. What”. Curly says: “One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything don’t mean ‘nuthen’.” “That’s great” Mitch replies. “But what’s the one thing?” Curly says “That’s what you’ve gotta figure out.” Paul figured it out for the Galatians… Continue reading →