Matthew 3:1-12 In 1948, an African American congregation in Alabama hired a new minister.  They were an upper-class urban congregation and worshipped in a very traditional style.  Thus, they were eager to hire a traditional minister, one with a wife who would teach Sunday School and perhaps play the piano, with a few children – […]

Isaiah 2:1-5 In 1999, hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians were driven from their homes to camps in Macedonia by the Serbian military.  It came in the midst of a brutal conflict, the scars of which are still not healed today.  Chris Hondros, a famed war photographer, captured an image in May of that year […]

A few weeks ago, a woman stopped by the church to talk to me about an idea she had to help the unhoused in the Winona community.  She and I serve on the poverty roundtable together and she is full of ideas and energy.  Anyway, that particular afternoon she had her young son with her.  […]

One of the things I love about preaching from the lectionary, or the three-year cycle of scripture, is I am often given a text that I would otherwise never choose.  This is one of them.  I have sat with this scripture all week, mulling over it.  Whether it has been in the car as I […]

I remember the moment as if it were yesterday.  I was sitting in a conference room across from David, the associate pastor of the church I was serving as a student pastor.  He was a young man, about the age I am now, and he had been assigned to be my teacher and guide as […]

I can’t remember if I have shared this here before, but it is only fair that you all know that I am a Sunday School drop-out.  I think I did maybe two or three years of Sunday School total.  I didn’t start attending a church at all until I was 10 years old.  And, while […]

This season marks my 6th as a season ticket holder to the Minnesota Opera.  I love the music, I love the soaring melodies, I love the staging, I love the drama, I love the costumes.  I love to sit and watch art in action.  And, I love how uncomplicated most of the characters are.  The […]

My first semester of my senior year of high school, I took physics.   I did, surprisingly, fairly well in that class.  Except for one thing.  We had a project, like many high school physics classes do, of making a rocket out of a 2-liter soda bottle.  The lesson, as I recall, was about aerodynamics.  We […]

It’s hard not to feel a little sympathy for the disciples in this scripture.  They have been following Jesus along his journey.  They have been told to give up all their possessions.  They have been told that he, Jesus, and God are one.  They have seen unexplainable miracles.  They have heard, over and over again, […]

Rev. Lillian Daniel, a United Church of Christ pastor in rural Iowa and a writer, was a speaker at the Festival of Homiletics, the preaching conference I attended in May.  She stood in front of probably 1000 preachers, looked at us and said, “I fear we have lost our way.”  She went on to say […]