blip : Basic Living Instruction Protocol :

Here’s a sermon from last week. It’s about politics; and Jim Wallis is my straw-man.
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Title: Paul’s Politics
Date: January 21, 2007
Texts: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; I Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21

There’s so much talk about politics. If you pay attention to the news at all these days, it’s almost impossible to ignore the presidential fever in the [...]

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I switched on the radio on my way to pick up my wife from work yesterday. And I half-listened to a report of a community in Nevada protesting a possible test conducted by the The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (funded by the US Department of Defense). It was a good story—quite interesting and informative. But [...]

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It’s certainly no secret that church splits in the Protestant world occur frequently and often; usually with more heat than light. I was struck last night, though, while listening to a small group discuss a possible merging of our church and another, that mergers can create just as much heat. Whether it’s fission [...]

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I had a couple of other prayers in mind for today, but then I came across this one this morning and it seemed especially fitting for today, Martin Luther King Jr. day. I’ve thought about racism from the perspective of Ephesians 2:14-16 or Revelation 21:24-26, but this prayer makes the point that just looking [...]

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Title: On Jesus’ tab
Date: Jan. 14, 2007
Texts: Isaiah 62:1-5; I Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11

Weddings are so frivolous. Or, Maybe I should say the wedding reception is the frivolous part. That’s not to say that they aren’t meaningful—they can be important, I guess. But no matter how simple they try to be, they always turn out [...]

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I’m writing ‘sermon starters’ for the Lent 2008 issue of Leader Magazine. And as I read Genesis 12:1-4 (the OT text for the second Sunday of Lent), I remembered a wonderful passage from Herbert McCabe’s book, Love, Law, and Language. First, here’s the text from the beginning of Genesis 12:
Now the Lord said to Abram, [...]

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Ask me not where I live
or what I like to eat….
Ask me what I am living for
and what do I think is keeping me
from living fully for that
—Thomas Merton
I came across that quote toward the beginning of last year and I think I may make it a tradition to reflect upon it at the beginning [...]

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