Charles Blondin was a tightrope walker who made a name for himself stretching a cable over the quarter of a mile between the United States and Canadian sides of Niagra Falls. Blondin impressed many people by easily walking across the tightrope time and time again. He even upped the ante several times, going across in…

“Of” is a pretty small word for all of its uses. I’m reminded of when I learned that “Of David” above many of the Psalms (e.g. Psalm 4, 23, 31) can mean different things. Some of the “of David” psalms mean that they are written by him, others mean that they are written according to…

If you’ve ever played the Parker Brothers game “Monopoly,” you’ve landed on a space called “Community Chest”. This space has its roots in the history of Atlantic City, NJ, which is the “base city” for the game’s many property names. The “Community Chest” in the early days of Atlantic City was a philanthropic organization which…

I call “A Jesus Centered Community of Scripture, Faith, and Grace” our “identity statement” at University Lutheran. In organizational parlance, there are mission statements galore, but this isn’t really a “mission statement” because rather than telling us “what we do” it tells us who we are.  Because of our baptisms, the biggest part of our…

If you’ve ever noticed the tag line that comes along with our branding at University Lutheran, you will know that it says “A Jesus Centered Community of Scripture, Faith, and Grace.”  The first part of that is the indefinite article “a”. Back in June I wrote about the power of the definite article, but there…

Tomorrow marks my 15th year of ordained service to the Church. Wikipedia tells me that fifteen is a “superabundant number,” but the article linked there confuses me. It also tells me it is a “triangular number” because you make make a triangle with 15 parts. It tells me that in Hebrew you write 15 as…

“The music seemed to come from all around us,” said one of the participants at the recent “Lower Keys Underwater Music Festival”. The music festival held underwater at Looe Key Reef featured special underwater speakers that blasted some “underwater hits” like “Yellow Submarine” from the Beatles and “Under the Sea” from the Little Mermaid soundtrack.…

During our road trip down from seeing my parents, one of my girls started asking questions about baptism as we were talking about baptism. It went something like this: Kid: “Hey daddy, do we need to baptize Dixie?” (the family dog).  Jay: “God only tells us to baptize humans, so we only baptize humans.” (Matthew…

This Saturday at 11am at Epiphany Lutheran Church ( 8300 Deer Lake S, Tallahassee, FL 32312 ) there’s going to be something great happening, Seminarian Tim Barber will be ordained and installed at Epiphany Lutheran. This is a BIG deal. It’s a big deal for Tim, it’s a big deal for Epiphany, it’s a big…

This week, a team from University Lutheran will be going to Kenya, to the Point of Grace Academy in Kisumu Kenya. While the team is there, they are going to be working with the school as well as helping run a medical clinic for the students and those associated with the school. They will be…