eternal life
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Swimming in life
It may be the question behind every other meaningful question we ask. One nameless man – a John Doe who could have been any one of us – put it this way when he ran up to Jesus and asked, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10:17). How do I Continue reading
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When the day begins
Last Sunday, on the anniversary of the Tops Market killings, Pastor Kwame Pitts, of Community of Good Neighbors Buffalo, spoke of the need to live out our faith through action, and she challenged us to consider our collective purpose as church, what our role is in all that led up to and now follows the Continue reading
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The other side of Good Friday
In popular tradition, the cross of Christ is a sign of rejection, shame, suffering, and death, which is the point St. Paul made when he wrote that Jesus “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8). You can’t get more humble, you can’t get lower, Continue reading
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The unbinding
Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.” (John 11:44) The season of Lent does not end with Easter. Resurrection is not enough. The risen Christ alone cannot provide the abundant life God offers, “real and eternal life, more and better life than [we] ever dreamed of” (John 10:10 The Message). Something more Continue reading
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The spring of life
I was mulling over what I would say to you today when I met Steven Spielberg for lunch and we started talking about his latest movie, The Fablemans. The film unlocks the meaning of most of Spielberg’s earlier movies – E.T. and Close Encounters, Jaws and Jurassic Park, the Indiana Jones films, Schindler’s List, Saving Continue reading
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The choice
It has been called “the most misread poem in America” (David Orr, The Atlantic, 19 May 2018). The poem is Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” and Frost seems to have shared that opinion. He warned his readers, “You have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem – very tricky.” The way Continue reading
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The key to life
It would be difficult to count the number of lives Dr. Jonathan Daniels touched, not only the parents and children in his pediatric practice who looked up to him but also the medical students in the school of medicine at the University at Buffalo for whom he was a mentor. “Students at the medical school Continue reading
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In the debris and clutter
How can you live the best life possible, a life full and satisfying beyond anything you can imagine? The quest for that life is as old as human history. We see it in the search for the holy grail, for the fountain of youth, for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Continue reading
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The way to life
We don’t observe the season of Lent to seek redemption from our broken nature; that’s already been accomplished. And we don’t observe Lent to practice some stricter rules for Christian life; authentic Christianity is not about following any rules. We observe Lent because we want the experience of being fully alive and fully human.1 We Continue reading
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The Sauntering Pilgrim 