Pastor's Blog

This past MLK Day, my wife happened to take the day to go up with my two young daughters to the Art “Institvte” of Chicago.  This is a place so high-tone that misspelling words means they are fancy.  I suppose if you’re one of the best art mvsevms in the world, you can get away…

I think it was the day we walked through the purple St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in St. Francis, SD (pictured).  Was it in a museum there or the nearby Beuchel Memorial Lakota Museum?  Perhaps it is indicative of the national self-medicating historical amnesia that neither do I remember exactly where I was.             One…

If you’re coming into this post without having read the previous post, stop right there, buster.  Read “four level of racism” first, then read this, lest you try to put new wine into old wineskins.  Don’t rush to the solution without first listening to the problem, or you could fail to hear at all.  Deconstruct…

The longer I work in multi-ethnic ministry settings, the more I wish I would have taught sooner and more insistently about this:             Racism is a sin with tentacles far longer than individual prejudice, exhibiting itself at the level of groups, institutions, and society-wide systems.  That’s not news, but even if we acknowledge that truth,…

The elderly woman sat across the squared tables from me, eating her rice and dried seaweed.  She was the oldest person among the dozen in the room, by far.  Bob and Sue, the American retirees from Florida, were the next oldest, and everyone else seemed to be younger than 40.             My wife and I…

One of my favorite passages in the Bible is the worship scene in Revelation 7:9-17.  It’s a big party and everyone is there.  Lots of humans.  God’s chosen from the Hebrews, Jews, and everybody else.  Representative leaders from the great God episodes of all time (the 24 elders, possibly to be taken as representing the…

One of the funny things I’ve noticed about our suburb, Lansing, IL, is the noise.  It’s not just the rumble-thrum of I-80 one mile north of my house, nor even the monthly summer “cruise nights” that bring classic cars with classic mufflers to line Ridge Road, it’s that people in my burb like to make…

“Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12, NIV)               In this most famous of Biblical chapters, often confusingly used in celebrations of romantic love…

Luke 5:15-16 “Yet the news about him spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses.  But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.”               This past week, I went away to the California coast to be quiet for a while.  I’ve…

Good Friday and Easter have come and gone.  The disciples, their world rocked, found normalcy in just fishing for fish for a night.  Our own high-emotion worship services, pageants, and celebrations with family and family in Christ have passed.  Even if our worlds were rocked, normalcy has its own gravity, and it is constant work…