Day1 Weekly Podcast

By Alliance for Christian Media, Inc.Religion & Spirituality Christianity

Day1 Weekly Podcast episodes

December 19, 2023 Veiled in Bread, the Godhead See
Two Sundays ago, after the Christmas Pageant, one of the children in the cast came up to me in the fellowship hall. “I have a question,” she said. “What’s your question?” “So, Jesus is alive?” I nodded. She thought about it for a moment. Clearly this hadn’t been her question. “Well,” she said, “if Jesus is alive, then how come we can’t see him?” I knelt over and I leaned in towards her and I whispered, like this was a secret too special to share. “Actually,” I said, “you *can* see him; in fact, you *did* see him just last Sunday.” “I did?” I nodded. “Yes, of course,” I said. “He was that bread on the table and the cup next to it. Jesus is alive and that’s the form – one of them, anyway – his body takes now.” She nodded. “Oh, cool,” she said. And then she ran off as quickly as a magi from the manger.
34 min
December 12, 2023 The Joy of Carrying Jesus
As we begin this third week of the Advent Season, we should all strive to be a little bit more like Mary and we should all work to find joy by carrying Jesus inside of us, regardless of what pain is going on in the world around us. If you hear me as saying nothing else, hear me as saying this: All of us are just a little bit like Mary, because all of us should have a joy that comes from carrying Jesus!
37 min
December 05, 2023 Good News: God Is Coming to You
The best Christmas sermon I ever heard was from the preacher who stood up on Christmas Eve and simply said to his congregation. “Tonight, I have some breaking news.” Then he leaned into the microphone for good effect and said, “Good news. Tonight, the invasion has begun. We’re about to be liberated. God’s come for us.” He sat down and we sang Christmas carols like our lives depended upon it, which of course, they do.
Sorry if you thought God was a projection of your fondest wishes and deepest desires, a technique for getting peace or justice or happiness or joy or whatever it is you think you just must have more than God. One comes to us; one whom we did not expect. Your world is about to be rocked. Don’t be surprised that you are surprised.
40 min
November 28, 2023 What Keeps You Up At Night?
I remember being abruptly awakened at 2:00 a.m. on a bitterly cold night. It was my wife. She said, “Wake up! It’s time!” Her water had broken. Our first child was on the way. How I’d longed across the pregnancy to know who this child would be. What color hair? What gender? Would they look more like their mother, or more like me? And when they were old enough to cry after a bad dream, who would they cry out for first – mom or me? My imagination about this long-awaited child was about to become real life. But when that wakeup call came, I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t terror stricken. I was elated. I was filled with adrenaline and joyful anticipation, as though someone had plugged me into a power grid and thrown the throttle-sized breaker from OFF to ON, and this great coming fulfillment of love made me “all flame.”
38 min
November 21, 2023 The Present King
This Sunday ends one liturgical year. We prepare to turn the page on a new church year. Cue up Advent, and let’s start the journey towards Christmas! I love Christmas Eve worship services. There’s nothing like a crowded sanctuary with lights turned off and candles lit while singing “Silent Night.” When we read the Christmas story in that setting, we are tempted to think the world stood still that first Christmas, and everyone showed up for the birth of Jesus. We can forget that God sent some angels to rouse a few shepherds to go worship the king. Later, some guys from the East show up in Jerusalem looking for the newborn king, and nobody knows anything about this birth. More people missed his presence that Christmas than those who showed up.
35 min
November 14, 2023 The Parable of the Harsh Master?
Until we finally reject our false projections about who God is and how God loves, that harsh master will always rule our lives, and we will spend every moment hustling for divine approval. Our moneybags might even be filled to overflowing in the process, but our hearts will be empty... ...Is the *Parable of the Talents* a window or a mirror? In the end, I suppose each of us gets to decide. But either way, wouldn’t it be lovely to look upon it and see the face of God gazing back at us in love and smiling?
33 min
November 07, 2023 The Parable of the 10 Girl Scouts
The good news is that Jesus doesn’t expect us to have blind luck on our side. Jesus doesn’t want us to have a flask of oil, or 5 bobby pins, or an ironing board, and a pack of gum. We’re not called to be prepared. We’re called to be awake. There will be situations and people that we will never be able to predict or to prepare for. But as long as we are awake to the world around us, God can do something wonderful through us.
30 min
October 31, 2023 Respectability or Faithfulness?
But not only do I think this moment presents an opportunity to refocus. I suspect that this moment in which the trappings of the church have disappeared like the emperor’s new clothes in the old fairy tale, I suspect this moment in which our extra wide prayer bands have been removed and our assumption of respectability discarded, I suspect this moment presents an opportunity for Christian people to more effectively reach out to those who have felt that the church makes no difference in their lives or in the world, an opportunity to have us be the kind of people Jesus would have us to be.
30 min
October 24, 2023 Carolyn J. Sharp: Witnesses to the Kingdom
On All Saints Day, Dr. Carolyn Sharp tells us, it is our joy to sit at Jesus’s feet as he speaks of the kingdom of heaven, and in the Sermon on the Mount we find a foundational teaching in which Jesus shows his disciples the radical good news of blessing for all who struggle.
44 min
October 17, 2023 Belonging to the God Who Doesn’t Belong to Us
It happens. We just don’t talk about it much—about how grateful we are for the people-not-like-us who crossed over a line to help us and how they don’t seem like the enemy to us—because when we’re with our own crowd that can come across as… I don’t know… traitorous, unprincipled, weak. Are you soft in the head? You know what they’re like when you’re not around, right? Are you changing sides? Talk like that is what turns us all into exiles—from each other—and there’s a lot of it going on right now.
38 min

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Discover a new source of inspiration each week with the Day1 Weekly Podcast, where a diverse cross-section of America's most compelling preachers from mainline Protestant churches share powerful…