WS Update: Meeting Strangers
I hope you have a restful long weekend as the unofficial summer season begins. In your travels this summer, you may encounter new people along the way. Those people, as random as they may seem, are not random at all. No one that we meet is an accident. God knows us, our story, and our…
WS Update: My Friend and Pastor
Thirty-five years ago this past week I graduated from Columbia Business School and was about to start a new job at Memorial Sloan Kettering. A friend from Columbia told me about a new church that was about to be planted on the Upper East Side not far from my apartment. This sounded like the dumbest…
WS Update: Courage
Yesterday we looked at the response of the disciples who had just spent the night in jail for preaching about the resurrection of Jesus (Acts 4:1-31). Immediately upon their release, John and Peter returned to their community and prayed. What is interesting to note is that they didn’t ask God to change their circumstances (get rid…
WS Update: Mental Health and the Church
In the book The Body Keeps the Score, there is one quote that summarizes the human need for connection: “’Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.” This past week there have been several articles highlighting…
WS Update: Life in the Spirit
Something happened on the day of Pentecost that had never happened before. Something so significant happened that day that it ushered in a new epoch and would change the rest of history. On that day, Jesus poured out his Holy Spirit upon all his people, and it would be the defining event that set the…
WS Update: 40 Days
The dawn of the Christian church as we know it begins with a crucial period of 40 days. During these 40 days that Luke tells in Acts 1:1-11, Jesus appears to his disciples and teaches them about the kingdom of God. He also commissions them to go out and spread the gospel. This period of…
WS Update: Living Easter
One week ago, on Easter Monday, we were reminded that the hope of the resurrection celebrated twenty-four hours earlier can be slippery, as reports of another mass shooting flooded our news feeds. The shouts of “He is Risen Indeed!” can too often be drowned out by a different kind of body count. This is the point…
WS Update: Infinity and Beyond
Every week leading up to Easter I re-read this 2017 obituary of the children’s author and filmmaker Amy Krouse Rosenthal who died tragically of cancer at the age of 51. Of course there is nothing unique about death, as one group estimates across the globe over 330,000 people die every day, or approximately 230 every…
WS Update: Holy Week Awe
We are now in Holy Week, a season of tragedy and salvation. We celebrate a lowly carpenter’s son who was killed for claiming to be God in the flesh. The people orchestrating his punishment thought killing him would end the possibility of a revolution and save their city. They didn’t know they were simultaneously so…
WS Update: The Dangers of Religion
Religion can be a dangerous thing. The religious leaders of first-century Israel had taken their expression of religion so far from God’s intention that Jesus considered them cursed (listen to yesterday’s sermon here). In our day, many people are turned away from religion because what they see is a far cry from what God intended…