Have you ever wondered what Jesus did to deserve being tortured and crucified to death? How could someone so good be treated so inhumanely?

Jesus is not my scapegoat / for any wrong I’ve done It isn’t fair to place on him / what he had never done

Even as we consider all the facts, the basic story that emerges is quite simple. The disciples were re-born while they lived with Jesus, and his death neither deterred nor discouraged them.  Instead, they turned to one another and embraced, fully aware in their hearts that he was not only still with them, but also that the newness he embodied embraced the universe. This was the bedrock of their faith and forms the foundation for the day we call Easter.

On a Friday a little over 2000 years ago Love was hung from a tree, nailed to a cross because of sin, and God I am not sure how the whole world didn’t come apart that day, I don’t know how the whole cosmo’s didn’t collapse.

A fully scripted Good Friday enactment courtesy of The Fountains, UMC.

Halloween is one of America’s favorite yearly activities. Unfortunately, Halloween can be America’s scariest, too - especially for those of us seen as costumes you wear rather than the human beings that we are.

Halloween is America’s gay holiday. In the words of the lesbian poet and scholar Judy Grahn, Halloween is "the great gay holiday." And this weekend of lavish costumed theatricality will attract everyone, but especially lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) revelers.

Millions of children in the Northeast quadrant of the United States will have to miss their annual spook-fest and candy shake-down on October 31 this year. Something far more terrifying than any Halloween slasher film rose up from the tropics and swooped onto the mainland in the last few days of October. Like a fell creature from JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the “Frankenstorm” named Sandy, spinning counter-clockwise (the Devil’s own widdershins), spread its Nazgûl wings from North Carolina to the Great Lakes. What began as a late-season Hurricane (strange enough) was sucked into an early Arctic cold front, and created a weather system never before experienced in recorded human time.