What if we spent a good part of one day filling our chest cavity with a vision of love at every deep breath? What if the 25th was spent sending light and love outward to unsuspecting people. People we lived with daily. They might not guess we were doing it. Or people we thought about that day. What if we consciously directed what we know of God toward them? What if we did nothing more than nurture our sacred flame in the remembrance of a single soul lit in Bethlehem so long ago? Would Christmas be big enough to hold such a thing, or would it spill out into 12 days, or ordinary days, or 365 days?

The way you tell the Christmas story, it all sounds so simple. So simple. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I really like it. It’s just that for so long now people have been telling my story and the way they tell it, it all sounds so simple and easy, so neat and tidy, that I hardly recognize myself in the story. It’s not your fault.  It all started a long time ago. Luke and that other fellow Matthew, they started it all.  They wrote my story down and wouldn’t you know it they cleaned it all up. But who can blame them.  Nobody likes messy birth stories. And as birth stories go, my baby’s birth was a really messy one.

"I am one priest and bishop in the church who is no longer willing to read [the Bible] through stained glass lenses," Bishop John Shelby Spong said. That might as well be the man's mantra, and this lecture exemplifies why.

John Shelby Spong continues his 5 day lecture series. He explains the colorful characters who hold dual purpose in the fourth Gospel.

We all belong. We are each one a part of the Temple of God. Paul wants the church at Corinth to recognize that they all belong to one another, and that it is foolish to divide and polarize around certain leaders. Paul argues that there is no place in the church for petty jealousies and pride.

The one thing that almost all theologians, biblical scholars, and historians agree on when it comes to Jesus is that the kingdom of God was foundational to his mission and ministry. It is front and center, it is at the heart and core of his life and work.

A supersessionist view of the Christian covenant might have made some little sense in a mythic worldview, but never made any moral sense. The time has long since come for Christians to drop such an arrogant claim. It has contributed to extraordinary suffering and eroded any moral authority we might think we have. In that sense, it never made any just sense of the work of God we’ve come to know in Jesus Christ.

What does the Doctrine of the Trinity look like if we reject the idea that it describes a permanent unchanging God? It describes a God as close as your breath, a God whose creative power continues to create, a God who we can see incarnate all around us.

Two healing stories intertwined, both involve females, both involve the number 12 - which brings the Reign of God to mind. What does it mean that it was women in this story. Surely it can't just mean, as some have said, (though not this way), that the gospel is for girls too.

Rev. Madison Shockley II A sermon on a topic ripped from the headlines.