Tag Archives: Bad Pastors
The Right-Handed Marriage
It is the strangest thing that we have in our holy book. It’s not a story of worldly success–much as preachers have tried to make it out to be just that. It’s not a story of patiently resigning ourselves to worldly evil. It’s a story, told in a hundred different ways, of giving the world up and then getting it back again. If we actually had to live it ourselves, how would we bear it–the walk to Moriah with Abraham and Isaac, the flight to Zarephath, the warning against the people who organize God’s worship, the chaos and terror of Golgotha?
Sermon: Holy Cross Day
I preached this sermon on September 14, 2014. Now, as I mentioned earlier we are not a society that is very interested in wisdom. The church in Corinth seems to have been divided over the question of who had true wisdom, which is not something we’re likely to lose friends over. We are, on the […]
Chicago Diarist: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
(I wrote this in January, 2007) My literary production, such as it is (and as far as I may use the term without self-mockery), is highly dependent on the CTA. Back when I still tried to write poetry, a conversation about a dead man overheard on a bus furnished the matter of one of the […]
Sermon Playback: Speaking of Satan
I preached this sermon three years ago on this weekend’s text (Matthew 16): And for Christians, this may be our special temptation and our special sin. It is to refuse Jesus as he offers himself to us. It is to look for or hope for or expect a different Jesus than the one who comes […]
Brutally Ordinary Things 