“What are you looking for?” It takes a special kind of person to venture out on a cold and snowy January morning to come to church. So, let me ask you again, “What are you looking for?”

Dr. Rev. Yvette Flunder, singing and preaching at Canadian Memorial about Numbers 11:24-30, and the radically inclusive love of Jesus.

Our 2020 updated version of the 8 Points of progressive Christianity

Three questions need to be clearly explained to the American public. What is Progressive Christianity? Secondly, what does progressive mean in the context of this religious movement? And, why is Progressive Christianity especially needed in our time?

TeenText 7 week Study Lent 1- Easter Sunday for Middle or High School: The Lenten season is rich in sensory exploration and story-based text.

Paraphrasing St. Oscar Romero, “If a church is not publicly opposed to war, to murder, to political assassination, of what use is that church?” While we may hope that churches will avoid wading into partisan politics, we cannot be tricked into believing that ethics is the same thing as politics. As the USA inches closer to war with Iran and ignores even the executive order of Ronald Regan forbidding political assassination, the prophetic church must now do the one thing for which we exist: speak truth to power.

Secular Consumerists (aka Secular Humanists) have made a cottage industry of bashing the belief system of totally innocuous and even quite benevolent people and they enjoy gleefully pointing to things like the Crusades, the Inquisition or the 30 Years War to, basically, say that Christianity sucks. They feel the Christian religion is impugned by such atrocities.

Though most western religious traditions seem to promise some kind of afterlife, what if, as Martin Hägglund articulately argued, our limited mortal life is all there is? Our days, being limited in number, become more valuable, and our work becomes more meaningful. Without eternity, preserving the earth becomes more imperative. Though many spiritual teachers give assurances they cannot support with evidence, this sermon deals with morality in a matter-of-fact manner.

Lenny Duncan is the unlikeliest of pastors. Formerly incarcerated, he is now a black preacher in the whitest denomination in the United States: the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Shifting demographics and shrinking congregations make all the headlines, but Duncan sees something else at work–drawing a direct line between the church’s lack of diversity and the church’s lack of vitality.

Theism, or supernatural theism (for the most part, they bear the same meaning) is a monotheistic conception of God that has been with us since the idea of monotheism first began to emerge in our Judeo-Christian story–after the Exodus (1,200 Before the Common Era), down through the time of the Babylonian Exile (587-538 BCE).

A sermon preached on the Second Sunday after Christmas – the readings for this sermon include: John 1:1-9, The Gospel of Thomas 70; Matthew 2:1-12.

“At the center of the Christmas story is hope…hope which comes to us in the form of a vulnerable, poor baby. A child, not a king, changes the world. God appears to us as a marginalized, Afro-Semitic, Jewish child from Nazareth in Palestine. A child who grows up to teach us to welcome the stranger. How would our world be different if we loved our neighbors as ourselves?” asks the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, senior minister of Middle Collegiate Church.

If we pay attention, the Christmas story is a mirror held up for us to see that we live in a country where the government locks thousands of migrant children into dog cages, sexually abusing some, torturing others, and allowing many to die while the church is largely compliant and silent. And we seriously wonder if this government might actually win election approval from poor church goers in a few months. Merry Christmas?

“Jesus heals not only us as individuals but a savior has been born, one who will heal the world from all its ills.”

Rev. Lines names the immaculate conception as “bad theology” and discusses the power of choosing to love.

In these dark and dreary days each year, our world turns to celebrate another Christmas holiday. Some may do so out of the sheer need to escape, if only for a fleeting while; grasping, once again, at a thin belief in some divine intervention into the human story, with the birth of a savior king. Deeply powerful rituals and traditions are dragged out of the attic and observed; going through the motions for yet another year. Others, however, like myself, may repeat some of the rituals to simply reaffirm one’s belief in the rebirth of “hope”.

It is Written in The Message, Ephesians Chapter 1, that Christ rules the Universe, all of it, from galaxies to governments, no one exempt from His power, He has the final say on all things. I have been trying to reconcile this for two years, to understand if this is a metaphor or actual truth, what is your perception?