All Posts for May, 2009

Blogging Toward Sunday

A double miracle

Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15; Acts 2:1-21

May 26, 2009 by Donna Schaper

Some of us are in Pentecost graduate school. We're seminary-educated and steeped in the church. We understand the preacher's dilemma when Easter comes early, before the earth has warmed up enough to take resurrection seriously, and we've been there, done that when it comes to the mighty rushing wind that appears seven weeks after Easter with great ecclesiastical regularity.

Blogging Toward Sunday

Why are you looking up?

Acts 1:1-11; Luke 24:44-53; Ephesians 1:15-23

May 18, 2009 by Kenneth H. Carter Jr.

We are in the interim between Easter and Pentecost. Of course, we live in an interim in other ways: we anticipate graduations, new jobs, the resolution of dilemmas. In the U.S., it is as if we are suspended between an old world--a disintegrating empire--and the emergence of something new.

Blogging Toward Sunday

In the Spirit's way

Acts 10:44-48; John 15:9-17; 1 John 5:1-6

May 11, 2009 by Kenneth H. Carter Jr.

The reading from Acts offers a foretaste of Pentecost, only two weeks away. After Peter receives a vision telling him that nothing is unclean, the same revelation is given to the community—this is the movement of the Holy Spirit.

Blogging Toward Sunday

Rooted in relationship

Acts 8:26-40; John 15:1-8; 1 John 4:7-21

May 04, 2009 by Kenneth H. Carter Jr.

Where once we lived in a vital relationship with the earth, now we obtain our daily bread by filling shopping carts and running a plastic card through a scanner. This lack of connection hurts us—and the same is true in our spiritual lives.