A Jesus Centered Community of Scripture, Faith, and Grace
Newsletter (Page 25)
Just the other day, my wife, Liz, made a cross-like structure out of some robot-shaped building blocks while playing with my girls. Tempest, my two-year old theologian, responded to Liz’s cross with these words: “You made a cross, Momma! Good job! Now somebody can die.” Liz posted a picture of the cross and Tempest’s words…
Hearts, hands with thumbs up, stars…it’s a “magically delicious” mix of dopamine inducing social media “Lucky Charms“. However, we’re finding that all of those arbitrary likes and loves and follows that we get on our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, etc are maybe about as good for us as Lucky Charms cereal are for diabetics.…
Recently I have been having a lot of conversations about guilt – my own and other peoples’. Much of the time, I find that we wrap guilt and shame up in the same basket. The dictionary definition of guilt is “the fact of having committed a specified or implied offense or crime.” Guilt is a…
I campus ministry for Kyle and Adam, two of our students who became pastors after (perhaps despite) their time here at University Lutheran. I campus ministry for Sherri and Andrew, who are working in the crazy fields of art and entrepreneurship in New York City while being integral part of their local church. I campus…
After last week’s “Question of the Week” about remembering the readings from Sunday, Liz and I got into a conversation. Liz is often a great asset to me in “church cultural” issues since she didn’t grow up in the Lutheran tribe. Her views are generally valid and helpful by themselves, but often even more so…
One of the things that we used to do here at University Lutheran is produce a resource called “Living the Lectionary”. The idea was that it was to be a devotional/discipleship guide that members could bring home with them and use throughout the week as they considered the readings from that Sunday. After a while…
Every Sunday morning here at University Lutheran, we use four readings. One from the Old Testament (but not the Psalms), one from the Psalms, one from a New Testament letter, and one from a Gospel. All of those readings should usually form a cohesive theme, for example, last Sunday’s readings were mostly about talking to…
We’re starting a new newsletter series that we will call “Connecting the Dots,” all about the readings that we experience on a Sunday morning. Normally speaking here at University Lutheran we hear 4 specific readings every Sunday: The First Reading – Normally the Old Testament, although in Easter this reading comes from the Book of…
Perhaps the whole reason that we have the notion of a “Bible reading plan” is due to a man named Robert Murray M’Cheyne (sometimes spelled McCheyne). M’Cheyne was a Scottish Presbyterian minister who devised his personal reading plan in the mid 1800’s. The plan is actually two plans in one. There are two sets of…
If you flip open to the table of contents on your copy of the Bible, you may not realize at first that the listing there isn’t exactly “chronological”. Sure, it starts with Genesis (the beginning) and ends with Revelation (the end), but it goes through a couple loop-de-loops in between. Theses loops have to do…