Preached on August 5, 2007 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge
Dedicated to my Grandparents Nelson and Donna; and always to the glory of God.
Luke 12:13-21
A man becomes rich, and stores wealth far in excess of what he will ever need, and considers himself secure and happy for many years to come. But suppose, Jesus says, that his life is demanded of him, and suddenly all that wealth becomes as worthless to him as losing lottery tickets. So, you can’t take it with you? Is that the message of Jesus. The hearse never has a trailer? But we already know that. We know that one day this life will end, although we don’t often think about it, and then the things we have stored away will become someone else’s problem.
But we also know that we want people to have a home that is safe and secure, there’s surely nothing excessive about that. We want people to be clothed well, to have enough to eat. That’s why we send out mission tours, and give our resources so that people can have what they need. Last week this congregation supported the building of an addition for a family’s home in southern Kentucky. We didn’t go down there and say, well, they might die tomorrow, so there’s no sense spending our time and money to house them. Of course we didn’t say that, because while life is not a guarantee, long life is what we hope and plan for, and we want people to live with dignity.
The problem with the man in the parable is not that he was well housed and fed - that’s our hope for everyone. The problem is that he was rich to excess, and his riches stood in the way of being rich toward God. Jesus says it over and over again, and our experience tells us the same thing: material riches stand in the way of being rich toward God. That’s the problem with having too much.
Charles Dickens knew that this was true. He wrote about Ebenezer Scrooge, the richest man in town, and about Bob Cratchit, who worked for him even on Christmas Eve for barely enough money to feed his family. And yet, on that fateful night when Scrooge was forced to look clearly at his own life, and then to look at the life of the Cratchit family, he found that Bob was a much richer man.
Or think of that other Christmas classic, the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Jimmy Stewart’s character, George Bailey, watches as his childhood friends and younger brother move away from Bedford Falls to become successful and rich, while he remains at home, giving everything he has to make a modest living with the Bailey Building and Loan, ever on the watch for rich man Potter, who threatens to buy up the whole town. But in the end it is not Potter who prevails. When a mistake puts George in danger of losing his business and being sent to jail, he discovers just how rich he is, not in material wealth, but in relationships and good will with all of Bedford Falls. His brother returns and gives the toast “to George Bailey, the richest man in town.”
These two stories are ways that we remind ourselves about the difference between being rich and being rich toward God. And we need reminding, because there are enough reminders in the world about what it means to be rich. We also need perspective, because most of the time we do not think that we are rich. No matter who it is, everyone compares themselves up, and never down. “You think I’m well off, you ought to see what so-and-so is making. You should see their house.” The reality is that if you take a global perspective, we then recognize that half of the world’s people live on less than one dollar per day. We then recognize that to have enough money to put $10 in a savings account, or even extra change in a bowl, means that we are among the wealthiest people in the world. We always compare up. And so we need reminding and perspective.
I want to suggest three ways to be rich toward God, and perhaps you will identify others.
Firstly, those who are rich toward God are be rich in relationships. Instead of storing up more for themselves, they will add extra seats at the dinner table, they will invite someone who may be alone to the Thanksgiving meal. They will open their homes to foster children, exchange students, and homeless animals. They will plan a vacation, and invite other people to come with them. We have a number of vacation organizers in this church.
Tony Campolo tells the story of a very successful businessman he knew who was getting ready to buy a new car once, and really liked these high end BMWs. But then he asked himself, would Jesus spend that kind of money on a new car? And so he made a different decision. He bought a used car, and he took that money and signed up to send monthly payments to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic to house and feed a number of children. And now he goes to visit this orphanage, and he has gotten to know the children he is supporting, and it means so much more to him than a great car ever could.
We need to listen to the psychologists. There’s a book in our church library called Stumbling on Happiness by Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert. It doesn’t mention Jesus or his parable about the rich man. But it tells us about the difference between shallow happiness and deeper, lasting happiness. Gilbert reminds us that things like a new car, new clothes or cd’s, all bring us a short-lived happiness. It’s great when they are new, but very soon what was new becomes what is expected. Our expectations change rapidly. At the end of World War II it was exotic to have strawberries in winter, and only the elite could afford it. Now it is expected. The shine of material riches fades fast. Lasting happiness, psychologists say, comes from our relationships with others. The more connected we are in relationships, the greater our riches toward God.
Secondly, those who are rich toward God are rich in meaningful work. Whether it is the work we are paid for, or the volunteer work given to ministries in the church, in our community, or in the world, when we are working for something that is important, that seeks to promote good in the world, then we will be rich toward God. I find that usually meaningful work has a way of choosing us. I remember attending the funeral of a young man who had been mentally ill and, tragically, had ended his own life. His mother was a retired teacher, and she told me that she had found her work for the next part of her life, to work for the care and support of those who suffer mental illness.
I think of the man I met in Atlanta, who was homeless and spent many years living at a shelter called the Open Door, and now he’s living in his own home, and working, but when he has a day off he comes back to this homeless shelter, and he stands at the pot of soup for over an hour at lunch time, filling the bowls one at a time, smiling and joking and meeting new friends. He says he needs to give back.
I want to tell a personal story about my grandparents. They were active in church, singing in choirs and volunteering in other ways. They volunteered at a hospital in retirement, just like so many in this church. And when they learned that three of their four grown children were gay, they helped to begin a group in their city for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and they would meet on the front porch with other parents, and they would give each other support, and they would work together to build bridges of understanding and an end to violence and hate toward their children. They are two of my greatest role models.
I think of all the business owners I have met who feel called to ignore the bottom line when someone can’t afford the supplies to repair their home, or needs groceries, or is unable to pay for the burial of a parent. And these people say “here, do me the honor of accepting a gift. Let me do this for you.”
Meaningful work has a way of choosing us, and it makes us rich toward God.
Finally, those who rich toward God will be rich with time. Sometimes we operate on the principle that time is money, and that every minute should be producing wealth. But what about the hour we spend here? What about the minutes that pass as we wait to receive the bread and cup? I believe that there is a richness in time that is set aside from doing, and is merely for being. We need time to simply be in the company of our spouses, our children, and our neighbors. We need time to simply be with God. That’s why we are here. We are not going to let our wealth get in the way of being rich toward God.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Sermon - How To Talk About Prayer Without Making God Look Bad
This sermon was preached at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge on July 29, 2007. I am indebted to Richard Wing and Tony Campolo for their work on this subject.
Luke 11:1-13
Dedicated to the members of the Adult Mission Tour, who are on their way to Kentucky this morning; and always to the glory of God.
I remember the movie “Oh God,” in which John Denver played an unassuming grocery manager who was unexpectedly visited by God in the form of George Burns, which is probably about what a lot of people thought God looked like anyway. It’s kind of an old movie now, but it had some good theology in it. God is asks John Denver’s character to be a sort of messenger, and in one scene God asks him to go to a church where there is one of these television evangelist types. The service he walks into is very slick, very glitzy. John Denver walks up to him right at the pulpit and says “I have a message for you from God.”
Well the preacher says real loud to everyone “this man has a message for God just for me! Go ahead son.”
And so he gives him the message: “Shut up! You are embarrassing God!”
Sometimes I think that God must cringe at some of the things that are said in God’s name. Even when we mean well, we can end up saying things that make God look pretty bad. Especially when it comes to prayer.
Tony Campolo wrote a book called Following Jesus Without Embarrassing God, which is partly the inspiration for this sermon. In it he talks about a woman who came to him once and said “my washing machine broke the other day, and I prayed for it, and God made it work again!” OK So she is saying that God heard her prayer and caused her washing machine to be fixed, and that this is apparently the same God who has not done anything for people like the woman who is dying of cancer with three young children, even though hundreds of people are praying for her. When we say that about God, it makes God look bad. If this were a parent who was fixing one child’s broken toy instead of taking a dying child to the hospital, we would find that parent negligent! And yet that’s what we seem to be saying about God.
What is prayer all about? There was a study some years ago involving a number of heart surgery patients who were divided into two groups. One group was prayed for by others without them knowing about it. The other group was not prayed for, and the results showed that the group who was prayed for did better. Wow! That was good news for those who want to talk about prayer getting results. So then there was the follow-up study. Using a much larger group of heart patients, and done over the course of ten years with two million dollars spent, they finally concluded that the prayed for group showed no significant difference in health. The headline in the New York Times read "Prayer Fails Major Medical Test."
That headline makes sense because of the image that most people have about prayer, which is that prayer consists of asking for the things that we want or hope for, whether for ourselves or someone else, and then either God grants us what we prayed for, or we call the prayer unanswered. Now sometimes we’ll get a little sophisticated and say that perhaps God answered our prayer in a different way, and we need to figure that out, but the image remains: we ask, God delivers. I think the headline should have read "Prayer-As-Supernatural-ATM-Machine Fails Medical Test."
Real prayer is our conversational connection with God. That’s what it is, and it is a gift beyond our understanding, which most of the time we don’t recognize, myself included.
I think if we can begin to clear away some of these misguided notions of prayer, then we will be on the way to recovering prayer as a sacred practice in our lives.
#1 Prayer is not magic. The anthropologist Bronislav Malinowski, who studied religious traditions across cultures, gave the classic definition.
“Magic, he wrote, is an attempt to control supernatural powers so that people get what they want. Prayer, on the other hand, is a process wherein people spiritually surrender so that they might become instruments through whom the supernatural powers do their work.”
Another way to think about it is that too often we pray like the man who goes to the doctor, spends five minutes talking about everything that hurts, and then leaves before the doctor can say a word. And we expect God to answer the prayer we have asked for without otherwise having to changer our lives at all. In truth, prayer is a place where we surrender ourselves that God might work through us, so that God might help us to give up our focus on what we want for ourselves, and look instead to what God’s will is for us and for others.
Prayer is not magic.
#2 Prayer is not something that works if you are extra good or spiritual. There are too many places, too many churches, where someone will come in tears about the prayer that has gone unanswered, and will be told “I’m sorry, buy you just didn’t pray enough.” Or, “you didn’t pray in the right way.” Or, worst of all, “you haven’t been faithful enough in your giving to the church. God will bless you when you give.” As if God is like the power company, shutting off the lights until getting paid. The book of Job should have cleared up this rotten theology a long time ago. God does not sit up above blessing the good and cursing the bad. Sometimes bad people enjoy health and wealth, and good people suffer greatly. Prayer doesn’t work by merit.
#3 Prayer is not to be understood. Tony Campolo writes, and see if this sounds like you: “I do it every morning, but I don’t have it figured out yet. The more I’m blessed by it, the less I understand just what it is. The more God fails to give me what I desperately beg for, the more assurance I have that God understands me, suffers with me, and will carry me through.”
The truth is that if prayer were just getting whatever we ask for, it would soon becomes very shallow, and we would ache and long for a bigger God.
So, we’ve cleared away some bad images for prayer. But how do we get started?
I believe that prayer begins with being truthful. When we pray, in is our conversational relationship with God, and so we tell God things about our lives, but of course these are things that God already knows. We don’t think that when we pray for our sister Mary who is in the hospital that God says “Whoa! When did this happen, which hospital?”
We do it because we need to be truthful. We need to speak the truth about our lives and the things we care about to someone who is listening.
And doesn’t it already begin to change us? Lifting names in worship calls our attention to specific acts, and it reminds us that everyone in this room carries burdens and when we remember that then we are more likely to meet everyone with kindness, to be slow to take offense, knowing how much each other person is going through already.
These prayers help us to reach out in comfort, support, and healing. We pray for those at war, and then we show our support in packages sent oversea, and a new ministry for veterans. We pray for peace and then we seek ways to understand our enemies and we take our prayers to the voting booth. We pray for those who are sick, and then we give blood, or join the Relay for Life to help with treatment and research. When we are truthful about ourselves, then we are well on our way to surrendering ourselves to God’s will for us, and God’s will for the world. “Your will be done on earth” is what Jesus taught us to pray.
Prayer also involves listening, and a willingness to change.
The movie Shadowlands tells the story of C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia books, Oxford professor, and a great writer on the Christian faith. The movie focuses on his marriage to Joy Greshem at a later age, and the cancer that afflicts her and finally takes her life. At one point during her struggle, he comes to a colleague and tells him that the cancer has gone into remission. He says to him
“I know how hard you've been praying; and now God is answering your prayers.”
But Lewis tells him: “That's not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God, it changes me.”
Finally, you don’t need to know how to pray to begin praying. Anne Lamott suggests that there are really only two kinds of prayers:
God, thank you.
And, God, help!
When Paul wrote to the Romans about prayer, he told them that “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”
Even when we don’t know what to say, just begin by saying “My God,” and let God’s spirit do the rest.
“My God… a child is hurt.”
“My God…more of our children died in Iraq.”
“My God…my friend is very ill. She’s had a long life and suffers so. I don’t know whether to ask for another five years or for a peaceful death. Help.”
“My God…I don’t know what to do.”
“My God.” That’s all you need to get started. And then listen, for the grace of God which passes understanding. Listen to be made new, to know that God will see us through, to know that God has the last word, and that word is love.
Luke 11:1-13
Dedicated to the members of the Adult Mission Tour, who are on their way to Kentucky this morning; and always to the glory of God.
I remember the movie “Oh God,” in which John Denver played an unassuming grocery manager who was unexpectedly visited by God in the form of George Burns, which is probably about what a lot of people thought God looked like anyway. It’s kind of an old movie now, but it had some good theology in it. God is asks John Denver’s character to be a sort of messenger, and in one scene God asks him to go to a church where there is one of these television evangelist types. The service he walks into is very slick, very glitzy. John Denver walks up to him right at the pulpit and says “I have a message for you from God.”
Well the preacher says real loud to everyone “this man has a message for God just for me! Go ahead son.”
And so he gives him the message: “Shut up! You are embarrassing God!”
Sometimes I think that God must cringe at some of the things that are said in God’s name. Even when we mean well, we can end up saying things that make God look pretty bad. Especially when it comes to prayer.
Tony Campolo wrote a book called Following Jesus Without Embarrassing God, which is partly the inspiration for this sermon. In it he talks about a woman who came to him once and said “my washing machine broke the other day, and I prayed for it, and God made it work again!” OK So she is saying that God heard her prayer and caused her washing machine to be fixed, and that this is apparently the same God who has not done anything for people like the woman who is dying of cancer with three young children, even though hundreds of people are praying for her. When we say that about God, it makes God look bad. If this were a parent who was fixing one child’s broken toy instead of taking a dying child to the hospital, we would find that parent negligent! And yet that’s what we seem to be saying about God.
What is prayer all about? There was a study some years ago involving a number of heart surgery patients who were divided into two groups. One group was prayed for by others without them knowing about it. The other group was not prayed for, and the results showed that the group who was prayed for did better. Wow! That was good news for those who want to talk about prayer getting results. So then there was the follow-up study. Using a much larger group of heart patients, and done over the course of ten years with two million dollars spent, they finally concluded that the prayed for group showed no significant difference in health. The headline in the New York Times read "Prayer Fails Major Medical Test."
That headline makes sense because of the image that most people have about prayer, which is that prayer consists of asking for the things that we want or hope for, whether for ourselves or someone else, and then either God grants us what we prayed for, or we call the prayer unanswered. Now sometimes we’ll get a little sophisticated and say that perhaps God answered our prayer in a different way, and we need to figure that out, but the image remains: we ask, God delivers. I think the headline should have read "Prayer-As-Supernatural-ATM-Machine Fails Medical Test."
Real prayer is our conversational connection with God. That’s what it is, and it is a gift beyond our understanding, which most of the time we don’t recognize, myself included.
I think if we can begin to clear away some of these misguided notions of prayer, then we will be on the way to recovering prayer as a sacred practice in our lives.
#1 Prayer is not magic. The anthropologist Bronislav Malinowski, who studied religious traditions across cultures, gave the classic definition.
“Magic, he wrote, is an attempt to control supernatural powers so that people get what they want. Prayer, on the other hand, is a process wherein people spiritually surrender so that they might become instruments through whom the supernatural powers do their work.”
Another way to think about it is that too often we pray like the man who goes to the doctor, spends five minutes talking about everything that hurts, and then leaves before the doctor can say a word. And we expect God to answer the prayer we have asked for without otherwise having to changer our lives at all. In truth, prayer is a place where we surrender ourselves that God might work through us, so that God might help us to give up our focus on what we want for ourselves, and look instead to what God’s will is for us and for others.
Prayer is not magic.
#2 Prayer is not something that works if you are extra good or spiritual. There are too many places, too many churches, where someone will come in tears about the prayer that has gone unanswered, and will be told “I’m sorry, buy you just didn’t pray enough.” Or, “you didn’t pray in the right way.” Or, worst of all, “you haven’t been faithful enough in your giving to the church. God will bless you when you give.” As if God is like the power company, shutting off the lights until getting paid. The book of Job should have cleared up this rotten theology a long time ago. God does not sit up above blessing the good and cursing the bad. Sometimes bad people enjoy health and wealth, and good people suffer greatly. Prayer doesn’t work by merit.
#3 Prayer is not to be understood. Tony Campolo writes, and see if this sounds like you: “I do it every morning, but I don’t have it figured out yet. The more I’m blessed by it, the less I understand just what it is. The more God fails to give me what I desperately beg for, the more assurance I have that God understands me, suffers with me, and will carry me through.”
The truth is that if prayer were just getting whatever we ask for, it would soon becomes very shallow, and we would ache and long for a bigger God.
So, we’ve cleared away some bad images for prayer. But how do we get started?
I believe that prayer begins with being truthful. When we pray, in is our conversational relationship with God, and so we tell God things about our lives, but of course these are things that God already knows. We don’t think that when we pray for our sister Mary who is in the hospital that God says “Whoa! When did this happen, which hospital?”
We do it because we need to be truthful. We need to speak the truth about our lives and the things we care about to someone who is listening.
And doesn’t it already begin to change us? Lifting names in worship calls our attention to specific acts, and it reminds us that everyone in this room carries burdens and when we remember that then we are more likely to meet everyone with kindness, to be slow to take offense, knowing how much each other person is going through already.
These prayers help us to reach out in comfort, support, and healing. We pray for those at war, and then we show our support in packages sent oversea, and a new ministry for veterans. We pray for peace and then we seek ways to understand our enemies and we take our prayers to the voting booth. We pray for those who are sick, and then we give blood, or join the Relay for Life to help with treatment and research. When we are truthful about ourselves, then we are well on our way to surrendering ourselves to God’s will for us, and God’s will for the world. “Your will be done on earth” is what Jesus taught us to pray.
Prayer also involves listening, and a willingness to change.
The movie Shadowlands tells the story of C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia books, Oxford professor, and a great writer on the Christian faith. The movie focuses on his marriage to Joy Greshem at a later age, and the cancer that afflicts her and finally takes her life. At one point during her struggle, he comes to a colleague and tells him that the cancer has gone into remission. He says to him
“I know how hard you've been praying; and now God is answering your prayers.”
But Lewis tells him: “That's not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God, it changes me.”
Finally, you don’t need to know how to pray to begin praying. Anne Lamott suggests that there are really only two kinds of prayers:
God, thank you.
And, God, help!
When Paul wrote to the Romans about prayer, he told them that “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”
Even when we don’t know what to say, just begin by saying “My God,” and let God’s spirit do the rest.
“My God… a child is hurt.”
“My God…more of our children died in Iraq.”
“My God…my friend is very ill. She’s had a long life and suffers so. I don’t know whether to ask for another five years or for a peaceful death. Help.”
“My God…I don’t know what to do.”
“My God.” That’s all you need to get started. And then listen, for the grace of God which passes understanding. Listen to be made new, to know that God will see us through, to know that God has the last word, and that word is love.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Doing the right thing
In this world there are many moral and ethical issues that are very complex, where it is difficult to discern the best choice, or best action to take. But most of the time, in most situations, we know how to do the right thing. We know how to show kindness, mercy, and even sacrificial love. It’s not too difficult to know.
There is a passage from the book of Deuteronomy (30:11-14) in which Moses is reminding the Hebrew people of God’s commandments. He says “Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.”
Most of the time, we need only look inside ourselves for God to guide us toward showing loving kindness to others, even to those who do not love us back. That is not to say that it is easy to do. It can be a difficult journey from knowing something to acting on it, and we will surely take wrong turns along the way. But it is a journey worth making, because all the Biblical and theological knowledge in the world is worth nothing if we don’t act in love. All that we do as a church in worship, fellowship, and learning, we do in order to be moved by love to love. Without that transformation, without love, it’s not worth much.
There is a passage from the book of Deuteronomy (30:11-14) in which Moses is reminding the Hebrew people of God’s commandments. He says “Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.”
Most of the time, we need only look inside ourselves for God to guide us toward showing loving kindness to others, even to those who do not love us back. That is not to say that it is easy to do. It can be a difficult journey from knowing something to acting on it, and we will surely take wrong turns along the way. But it is a journey worth making, because all the Biblical and theological knowledge in the world is worth nothing if we don’t act in love. All that we do as a church in worship, fellowship, and learning, we do in order to be moved by love to love. Without that transformation, without love, it’s not worth much.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Summer Reading
For me, reading is one of the best ways I’ve found to discover more about myself, my faith, and the world around me. Whether it is fiction or non-fiction, light reading or studious, the books I’ve read have allowed me in on someone else’s thinking and experience. I love those moments in a book when I think “I’ve had the same feeling, but never had words to express it before” or “so that’s what life is like for others.”
I also like to discuss the books I’m reading, and to hear about what other people are reading. I have discovered a number of great books by recommendation from this congregation. And so, to keep the conversation going, I’ll share my stack for summer reading this year.
Praying Like Jesus, by James Mulholland, is what we gave our high school graduates this year. It is an examination of the Lord’s Prayer by an insightful American Baptist minister.
The Highest Tide, by Jim Lynch, is a novel about a teenage boy who lives on the water of Puget Sound. I just finished this one, and I learned a lot about the fascinating sea life that lives in the ocean tides in this story about coming of age and responsibility.
Christianity For the Rest of Us, by Diana Butler Bass, is an examination of how old, mainline churches are thriving by exploring ancient Christian practices like hospitality and testimony.
The Emerging Christian Way is a collection of essays edited by Michael Schwartzentruber, in which a variety of writers describe and envision how the Christian church is moving into the third millennium.
Wicked, by Gregory Maguire, is a re-imagining of the land of Oz and the wicked witch of the west. I’ve heard great things about the musical and the novel.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, by J.K. Rowling. Our entire family is awaiting the release of the final volume in this series. They are wonderful books to read and talk about with all ages.
Finally, Thirst is Mary Oliver’s relatively new book of poetry. She is one of my favorite writers.
I also like to discuss the books I’m reading, and to hear about what other people are reading. I have discovered a number of great books by recommendation from this congregation. And so, to keep the conversation going, I’ll share my stack for summer reading this year.
Praying Like Jesus, by James Mulholland, is what we gave our high school graduates this year. It is an examination of the Lord’s Prayer by an insightful American Baptist minister.
The Highest Tide, by Jim Lynch, is a novel about a teenage boy who lives on the water of Puget Sound. I just finished this one, and I learned a lot about the fascinating sea life that lives in the ocean tides in this story about coming of age and responsibility.
Christianity For the Rest of Us, by Diana Butler Bass, is an examination of how old, mainline churches are thriving by exploring ancient Christian practices like hospitality and testimony.
The Emerging Christian Way is a collection of essays edited by Michael Schwartzentruber, in which a variety of writers describe and envision how the Christian church is moving into the third millennium.
Wicked, by Gregory Maguire, is a re-imagining of the land of Oz and the wicked witch of the west. I’ve heard great things about the musical and the novel.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, by J.K. Rowling. Our entire family is awaiting the release of the final volume in this series. They are wonderful books to read and talk about with all ages.
Finally, Thirst is Mary Oliver’s relatively new book of poetry. She is one of my favorite writers.
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