Ezekiel

In catacombs, crypts, and ossuaries, I’ve seen the ugliness of death transformed into something beautiful.

“Yearning for life is a part of what it means to be human.”

God’s Spirit before birth and after death

We practice our faith in the season of Lent so that we know what to do when things get harder. 

David Wallace-Wells charts a path for life in the wake of global warming.

What does it do to the body and spirit to be preyed upon constantly?

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.

God is calling us out.

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

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

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 begin sermon preparation by reading through the texts and writing a 200-word summary of the themes I observe in that initial reading. I include this summary in an online publication for the congregation I serve. It's called "Sunday is Coming," a title with an edge for the preacher.

When I do this reading I I look for trouble—for the obvious, palpable problems in the text.

Ezekiel steps right into the middle of a group of people busy at that most ancient of activities, going back to Eden: the blame game.

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.

God calls us out of the metaphorical tombs in which we are buried: addiction, hopelessness, guilt. But I believe God also calls us out of the tangible tombs of entrenched poverty, poor education, and limited opportunity.

These parables are like God's joke in the form of an invasive species.