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Burundi, today I turned my face away from you. Every word I heard sounded like a rumor, not a fact. My head ached as it spun in a sea of unconfirmed reports from a multi-lingual press corps. And glad tidings were nowhere to be found. So I stopped hunting for hope amid 140 cryptic characters, stopped scanning news outlets… I just stopped. I looked elsewhere or maybe nowhere at all, but certainly not in your direction. Not today.   Burundi,…

Jesus said the Kingdom of God is like sourdough starter that a woman took and hid in 40-60 pounds of flour. The Greek word means encrypted. The woman hid a small batch of starter in copious amounts of flour, knowing full well the leaven would be revealed when the dough rose, as it was baked off and the loaves ready for distribution. This story hints at an intentional hiding and an equally intended revealing. Read the full post over at…

[caption id="attachment_1858" align="aligncenter" width="876"] Photo Credit: Jerome Delay // The Associated Press[/caption] On Mother’s Day the women of Burundi took to the streets. Recent weeks have brought conflict onto these very streets – protesters, police, tear gas, water cannons and even live ammunition – and dead sons. The president continues to push for an unconstitutional third term that will break the Arusha Accords peace agreement and possibly ignite another season of ethnic violence. Meanwhile, the economy crumbles. The most vulnerable…

Brian McLaren is a good friend, the kind you can dive deep into conversation with poolside in Burundi or on the sandy beaches of Florida. He is the person I reach out to when I get mired in a theological quandary or need to search out a good resource or two. He is the person we can count on for calm in a crisis, wise counsel and prayerful solidarity amid our own kind of turmoil. Both the links I want…

Straight-forward enough... I wanted to share some of my favorite books about Jesus. These are the books that stick with me years after reading, works that have introduced me to new facets of Jesus or the world he inhabited. I don't agree with every conclusion every author comes to, but I've learned from each one. I won't belabor things with long explanations. But as I head to Denver for Simply Jesus soon, I wanted to share the books that have…

I felt empty. I felt nothing. I felt no inclination to say yes or no, to ask another question or devise another strategy for success or resolve. Faced with an unexpected opportunity, spending more than a week wrestling and wrangling, I found myself one Saturday morning as empty as my dried up fountain pen. There was nothing more to work with–a blank page with no ink. I felt emptier, though. Empty like the Grand Canyon–big, wide and utterly vacant. I…

“Mama, I’ve been meaning to tell you something. I don’t believe in God anymore.” My eleven year old son told me with a matter of fact chirp how he is thinking differently about God these days as he hears more on the playground, in Sunday school and around town. “Tell me why you don’t believe in God anymore,” I asked. He rattled off a litany of things like how he has never seen God with his own two eyes or…

“It’s Friday – but Sunday’s coming!” I’ve already heard this several times today across my Twitter feed and in various Facebook posts. We know this to be true. We know Sunday, chock full of resurrection newness, is coming. But what if we didn’t know? Can you imagine a cross-heavy Friday without the knowledge of Sunday? ~~~ Today I find myself pondering the friends of Jesus, the men and women who followed him for three years. I think of his mother…

I’ve ready many books about Lent, Easter and Passion Week in my long Christian tenure. I’ve read it from Evangelical perspectives, from within the Catholic and Episcopal traditions and read Methodist resources, too. I could speak about a stack of books. I could, but there is one that surpasses them all in my opinion. The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem by Marcus Borg & John Dominic Crossan [one_third][/one_third][two_third_last] When I read The…

Imagine the entire history of the universe, all 13.8 billion years of it, as one cosmic year. At the stroke of midnight on January 1st the Big Bang happens. The galaxy begins to unfold, to stretch across the vast expanse with forces unknown to us still. Waves and particles in motion weave in and out of the folds of the young cosmos. Galactic material whirls and whizzes, even spins around stars (or were stars twinkling yet?) in a series of…