On the first day of Unleavened Bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Where do you want us to make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?” He said, “Go into the city to a certain man, and say to him, ‘The Teacher says, My time is near; I will keep the Passover at your house...
The Risk of Not Changing
posted by DJL
You know the stats. The mainline church in North America has lost significant numbers of members over the last several decades. The ELCA alone suffered a 20% loss over the last fifteen years. This isn’t news. What is news – or what should be – is how little we’re doing about it. Oh, don’t get me wrong – we have all kinds of programs and meetings and studies and initiatives. Yet when it comes down to calling into question basic assumptions about worship and preaching and congregational life and leadership, we continue to do what we’ve been doing for much of the last century. Last night, after making a presentation on some of the...
Matthew 26:14-16
posted by DJL
Then one of the twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, “What will you give me if I betray him to you?” They paid him thirty pieces of silver. And from that moment he began to look for an opportunity to betray him. Here is the heartbreak. To be betrayed...
The Lanyard
posted by DJL
Billy Colllins’ poem puts me in mind, not of the countless rather worthless crafts or gifts I made my mother over the years – though I suspect she did not count them as worthless – but rather of the labor and delivery room in which our first child was born. I remember as vividly as if it...
Matthew 26:10-13
posted by DJL
But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why do you trouble the woman? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me. By pouring this ointment on my body she has prepared me for burial. Truly I tell you, wherever this good...