Blog - Jesus

So for folks who read my stuff, or have heard me speak, you know that I am ridiculously annoyed with the echoing space in the creed between Mary’s birthing of Jesus and Pontius Pilate’s offing of him.

So, poverty is in the news here in South Dakota.

Tuesday, post Holy Week.

Daughter Else asks magnificent questions.

Wally Taylor teaches New Testament at (the truly outstanding) Trinity Lutheran Seminary, in the fair city of Columbus, Ohio.

(This blog is an adaptation of a recent presentation I gave at the Sawmill Retreat Center in Huron, OH, for a clergy and rostered leaders’ event for two combined ELCA synods.  The theme of our days together was that of discipleship).

Appropriately, I think, I tend to keep personal updates off of my OMG Facebook page.

I was fussing with the idea of re-posting this blog this week, but then a friend of mine made reference to it today, and I viewed it as a sign that maybe I should just as well go ahead and do it for the third year running.

Google yields only one pop song, and an iffy one at that, with the word “finitude” in its lyrics.

Dear all,

Within days, our eyes and ears and minds and hearts have drawn in far too much smoke and fire and blood and weeping.

I have Reinhold Niebuhr on the mind these days.

We have been waiting for weeks now to sing that very first verse: “Joy to the world, the Lord is come!”

So rumor had it, when I was young and svelte, that when a person ages, their metabolism slows down, and they gain weight more easily, and it takes a lot longer to work it off.

So tonight I learned that the tradition of paper advent calendars with windows that open to chocolate, or, for the more pious of us, Bible verses, started in Germany in the early 1900s.

I was listening, the other day, to a man on the radio who said that he advocated “Value Based Voting.”

A week ago or so a pastor friend of mine posted this text from Psalm 23, verse 6, on her Facebook page: “Your beauty and love chase after me everyday of my life.”

Today, at 10:00 p.m., South Dakota will execute a man, and another man within the next couple of weeks.

“How is the Holy Spirit found in everyday life?”

This blog is a posted version of the sermon I preached this morning at Springdale Lutheran, and in light of the events in Colorado, and in light of the day-to-day lives of so many  suffering sisters and brothers in the world.