Making Rough Places Smooth

Just about everybody has heard about John the Baptizer, the one who showed up out of the wilderness to start baptizing people in the Jordan river. John announced the

More Epiphanies

The season of Epiphany stretches, officially, from January 6 to February 7 this year. It celebrates the "appearing" or "presentation" of Jesus to the public in different ways in his early life. One is at the Temple in Jerusalem (Luke 2), another to the Gentile wise men, or Magi (Matthew 2), still another at his baptism (covered in all four gospels in different ways) and the

Epiphany and Risk

Today, January 6, is the celebration of "Epiphany" on the Christian calendar, and it's celebrating something awesome: the first 'public appearance' of the baby Jesus, the Son of God now in human form. What's that about? And what

Whose Faithfulness?

We often like to chuckle at the story of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptizer.  The angel Gabriel appears to him, and he has a hard time believing what God will do through him and his wife Elizabeth. So as a friend of mine pointed out, God didn't

Don't Be Afraid, it's Good News!

If you saw a headline that said "Great News! Stock Market Crash Wipes Out Wealth of Millions!" you'd wonder about the writer's sanity. Good news is supposed to benefit people, so they jump up and down in delight. The night Jesus was born, an angel appeared to shepherds out in the field to bring them this good news. The angel explained, "I bring you good news of great

Glory

A view of the eternal is always dangerous. When you get to see what you've longed for, nothing else is ever the same. Ask Moses: he wanted to see God's glory up close, and the Lord said yes, at least some of it. In Exodus 33 God says "Yes, you can see my back but not my face -- nobody can see my face and live!" And so he passed by Moses, who got a

The Hope of Glory

from my fellow pastor Bill Winn, at the Trinity and Humanity blog:

We huddled in a small room above a sympathetic citizen’s house. It was a tense time here in the Middle East. Christians were being rounded up and killed in horrible ways. It has been astonishing to us to witness the cruelty human beings are capable of inflicting on each other. The most glaring example is the Crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ. For a moment on that rooftop, as we were being systematically hunted down and