Second Sunday of Advent (Year 4, NL)

What does it mean that Jesus weeps, when he knows Lazarus will be raised from the dead?

We embrace uninitiated visitors, rowdy children, and blue jeans. Why not tears?

The synagogue at Dura, in present-day Syria, contained three murals recounting the history of Israel from the ancestral period through the exile and resettlement of the land.

Honestly, it seems like our flesh has a massive design flaw.

Romans 8:6–11; John 11:1–45

My state has the same number of churches as prisoners. This fact haunts me.

After the anointing at Bethany, Judas asks why the fragrance wasn't sold and the money given to charity. A more apt question might be why Mary didn't use it on her brother Lazarus, dead just a few days before.

I was a little girl, sitting near the front row of the church. My legs could not touch the floor, and I had to hold my hands laced in my lap so that I could remain still. I stared at the coffin before me.

When I read John 11 and heard Jesus thundering, “Unbind him and let him go!" I realized I had not forgiven my father.

When I was baptized at 12, I refused what Baptists call “the right hand of fellowship.” I wanted the water but not the fellowship.

I know what Jesus is doing in this story; I have three small children. He's dawdling.

Perhaps it's only when we let go of who and what our loved one was that we can receive who they are now.

Langston Hughes challenged our consciousness by asking, “What happens to a dream deferred?” What results when hope, aspirations, callings, and promises are delayed, put off, postponed, or thwarted? Were they flawed expectations? Do such deferred dreams become burdensome desires that fade and never manifest, forever haunting us?

Six months after Michael Brown was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri—where I serve as a pastor—there are families still wrestling with the question, “What would have happened if...?”

What would it mean for us to be filled with the breath of God again and come to life for the sake of racial justice?

I remember I stopped dead in my tracks. I had been walking along the flat, dark shale bed of the ravine behind my grandfather’s farmhouse in southern Indiana. There on the ground, still in perfect alignment, lay the skeleton of a cow that had wandered away one winter many years ago and had slipped and fallen into the ravine. The bones lay in precise order—the head bone connected to the neck bone, the neck bone connected to the back bone, and so on.