Churches often have a list – official or not – of people who are “out of bounds”, people who don’t fit into the neat categories we use. In the story of Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch, we find a call to move beyond our...

Our culture has a particular definition of what counts as beautiful, a carefully constructed image into which nearly no body fits. Much as in the days of the early church, the powers that be have a vested interest in controlling our bodies. When...

We are a nation of rebels, in a world of rebellion. We’ve all chosen our way, our vision of the good life, at the cost of someone else, on both personal and national levels. And when we stop to consider the fate of rebels in our world, the picture...

We live in a world of scarcity, where we’re convinced there’s not enough to go around. But God created a very good world, one that was not a zero-sum universe. In the wake of Pentecost, we see the early church living into this abundant creation...

We’re all well-acquainted with failure – in our personal lives, our vocations, our dreams and aspirations. When we fail, fear of failing again can paralyze us. But what we don’t see is that God is working, even in our failures, to bring life...

We all cling to certain things in our lives – our jobs, our families, our beliefs. But all too often, the way we cling to those things brings exhaustion, despair, defeat – in a word, death. We find true life in letting go of our lives, allowing...

Many times, we don’t recognize when we are doing things that are destroying our life. For us its just the way it is, comfortable, what’s expected. Sin works this way too. It’s hard to see that the only result of a life lived that way is...

When someone challenges our identity, we get angry. But maybe the problem is that we’ve built our identities on the wrong things. Israel made the same mistake – they had allowed the Law and the Temple to define who they were, and injustice...

What labels do you carry in your soul? For good and bad, we all have many identities we’ve taken (or been given) by people in our lives. We begin to inhabit these identities, to take on the labels as who we are, even when they are toxic. The...

Say the word "Repent" and many of us get flashes of fire and brimstone. But in this first week of Lent, we see that Jesus' call to repent isn't judgment and condemnation. It's the fulfillment of God's promise not to war with humanity. Jesus'...