I heard this mother yelling at her children, “If you don’t get in here this instant I will spank you!” The children kept playing. She yelled, “I mean it!” The children kept playing. And low and behold those children never did get a spanking.Whatever your views are on spanking, you can probably see that threatening… Read More ›

What is the worst thing you can imagine? Try this one: you have been gone from your city for quite some time. When you return you hear the sound of a battle taking place. Smoke lingers in the air and buildings lie in ruins. This is where your family and friends live and apparently they… Read More ›

What if someone wrote a biography about you and got it all wrong? And I’m not talking about a biography written long after you are dead. Nope! You are still alive and almost everything in the biography is false. It doesn’t represent you at all.

A small group of believers decided that they wanted to build an edifice dedicated to the worship of God. They worked hard at raising the necessary money. They worked hard at construction to keep the cost down. They worked for three years. When it was all done, they had a beautiful building. But somewhere in… Read More ›

Every holiday season (Thanksgiving and Christmas) my wife makes this wonderful peanut butter pie. Now this pie is not an everyday pie. It is not even an every holiday pie. We don’t eat it on birthdays; it’s not for Easter consumption; the Fourth of July is right out. If we had this pie every day… Read More ›

The ancient rabbis taught that when you hold the word of God in your hands, your hands should feel filthy. I wonder if that even makes sense to us. Do we have a sense of the terrible holiness of God? Can we grasp our complete lack of purity without crumbling in ourselves? Can the holiness… Read More ›

Years ago there was a preacher who worked with a congregation in a small Midwestern city. Now, one of the members of this congregation was a wealthy woman who regularly contributed a large sum to the church; more than anyone else. This, she thought, gave her the right to tell the preacher what his topics… Read More ›

What are your thoughts concerning ritual? If we claim that something has become ritualistic, we usually mean that the act is being done superficially, devoid of original intent or substance. Right? We say things like, “That’s just ritual” or “That group is so ritualistic”. And if something is deemed “ritual” it is understood to be… Read More ›

When I was in college and taking Greek – just for fun – my teacher told us that we would have to work on our studies every day. We started out as a class of nine. Apparently, not many people find Greek to be fun. Go figure. We ended up with three. And we ended… Read More ›

Years ago I heard a preacher use God’s instructions concerning priestly garments as means to beat people over the head for not dressing up on Sunday morning. I mean some of the people were wearing jeans on a Sunday morning. I wonder if some of those jeans were holey. This brings up an important rule… Read More ›