Crazy Faith Talk

Increasingly in church communities, people are familiar with Ash Wednesday as the beginning of the season of Lent for Christians, with its somber call to repentance and fasting, and the characteristic ashes marked on people's foreheads.  And even more well-known are the festivities around the world on the day before known as Mardi Gras, Carnival, Fat Tuesday, or--slightly less well-known--Shrove T...

Here's a palate-cleanser for your soul.  Sure, there are some well-known and long-established traditional practices within Christian spirituality--serious and somber things like contemplative prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, daily devotions, or the daily office of praying the hours.  But spirituality doesn't happen only in medieval monasteries or fixed rituals--sometimes we stumble into it by discover...

In a culture where you audition, interview, or apply for positions to try and prove your worth, and where you can be dismissed or voted off the show at a moment's notice if you don't make the cut, Jesus has a surprising way of gathering disciples to share in his work.  He seeks them out, not from among the brightest and the best, but from among ordinary people who just had a bad day at work.  In t...

Like newly elected presidents give an inaugural address to lay out their priorities, vision, and the kind of administration they want to lead, the early chapters of each of the four Gospels in the New Testament give us public words from Jesus that lay out his vision and values.  The thing is, Jesus' inaugural address reveals a "platform" that takes society's usual expectations and turns them upsid...

Immediately after being baptized, having heard a voice from heaven claim him as God's own beloved Son, Jesus heads out into the middle of nowhere to face down the Tempter.  And leading the way to drive him toward that confrontation with the devil is the very same Holy Spirit who had descended on him at his baptism.  What a strange turn of events--but what does it mean, and how does it introduce us...

Every year, the church's pattern for keeping time sets aside a season--called Epiphanytide--for getting to know Jesus all over again.  As we get new angles on introductions to Jesus, today we turn to a story told in some form by each of the Gospel writers, about Jesus' being baptized.  Clearly, this is a story that helps introduce who Jesus is--after all, there is a literal booming voice from heav...

Although they are less well-known or widely-practiced than the Advent wreaths, nativity scenes, and pageants around Christmas, or the disciplines and ashes of Lent, there are some really beautiful practices to explore in the season of Epiphany for individuals, families, and churches.  In today's episode of Crazy Faith Talk, pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve introduce us to some of them and how they...

In the earliest centuries of the Christian church, the first celebrations of Jesus' coming were less focused on the manger scene and more on Christ being revealed to all the world, from the visit of the Magi to all the nations of the world.  Maybe our ancestors in the faith were onto something: maybe we need to recover a sense of wonder and appreciation that God not only comes to us in Jesus, but...

If it's OK for Jesus to grow into being himself--maturing, learning, asking questions and figuring out his identity--then it's OK to grow into our own skin, too.  Sometimes church folk forget that, and we assume that a fully-grown, all-wise adult Jesus beamed down from heaven, a la Star Trek, without having come through the learning and growth of childhood and adolescence.  But as Luke the Gospel...

Lots of people know the Christmas story, which finds Jesus as a newborn infant laid in a borrowed manger.  Plenty of people know stories about the adult Jesus healing, teaching, turning over tables, or headed toward the cross.  Not as well-known, though, are the handful of stories we have in the Gospels about child Jesus, so that's where we're headed in this new Christmastide series of Crazy Faith...

After all the talk in this series about how Advent has its own feel that is separate from Christmas--with Advent having its own unique tension, longing for the future, deliberately slow pace, and often somber songs--it's time at last for pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve to talk about how we prepare for Christmas, too.  As individuals, in families, as pastors in congregations, and within a wider cul...

There are radio stations and internet streamig services exclusively dedicated to "Christmas music," both sacred and secular, offering non-stop holly, jolly melodies... and then there is the curious phenomenon of the church's catalog of Advent songs.  Spanning centuries and styles, the songs of Advent are often tinged with lament, with waiting, with expectation, and with a vulnerability as we hope...

In a sense, all of Christian life is lived in the tension of the "already" and the "not yet"--between the coming of Christ two millennia ago, and the promise of Christ's coming in glory and the hope of new creation.  Advent is just one of those seasons that names this tension out loud, and steers into it, rather than pretending it isn't there.  So in this latest episode of Crazy Faith Talk, pastor...

In a new season and a new series, pastors Sarah, Erica and Steve explore the season many churches have begun observing this past Sunday, the season of Advent that prepares us for Christmas.  But in a culture that is already rushing head-long into Christmas sales, music, and decoration, having a season focused on waiting and taking the time to prepare can seem strange.  And in a culture that alread...

On this 250th episode of Crazy Faith talk, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve close their series on essentials of Christianity by looking at the beauty--and messiness--of actually living the Christian faith in community with others.  We aren't all like-minded or from the same background, and others have rough edges that grate on us, just as we have rough edges that grate on others.  And yet, we need...

Being a Christian can never quite be reduced to only head-knowledge or facts to be memorized.  It always carries with it some sense of the Mystery of who God is, and how the infinite, intangible God who is beyond physical form or limitations chooses to communicate with us through physical means.  That is to say, Christians don't merely memorize or think their way into knowing God, or even feel the...

The message "Jesus saves" is all over the place, from bumper stickers to billoards, to neon sign at store-front churches.  It's even there in Jesus' name, which means "God saves."  Countless people have been told by televangelists and celebrity preachers to "accept Jesus as your Savior," too--but what do we think that means? What does it mean to say someone is "saved"--and is it a past tense event...

From its earliest roots, Christians have claimed that in Jesus we are given the fullness of God and genuine humanity all at once.  And while that certainly says something important about the nature of Jesus, it also says something pretty powerful about the nature of God: that God is capable of being expressed through the fragility, vulnerability, and earthiness of humanity.  And it says something,...

We're used to thinking of "the Bible" as a single book, written all at once, since we carry personal copies within a single cover.  But it's really more of an anthology, spanning cultures, times, authors, and genres, which means that carrying a Bible is rather like walking around with a library that took a long time to put together.  In their ongoing series, "Christianity 101," pastors Erica, Sara...

Is God important?  Absolutely!  Is faith important in relating to this God?  Again, probably just about every professing Christian would agree there, too. But then the moment we start saying anything about who this God is, or what God is like, we're into the territory of faith-statements or creeds.  And there, curiously enough, different Christians head in different directions.  Some recite ancien...

In this new series about the Big Ideas and Central Questions of Christian faith, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve gather around the conversation table to look at what we mean by "faith."  Everybody seems to agree that "faith" is a good thing, and that it is important, but what exactly are we talking about? Are "faith" and "fear" opposites, as sometimes gets said by some in the COVID era, making it...

Whether you have been a part of congregational life since you were in diapers or have been wrestling from the margins of community about whether you even believe in God any god, or many gods, much less the specific faith called Christianity, we invite you to a new series meant to explore some of the Big Questions and Central Ideas of faith.  For folks who would call themselves life-long Christians...

Conventional wisdom is easy:  it's good to be strong, it's bad to be weak, and if you are being a good and faithful religious person, God will give you the things you pray for.  Right?  That sure is popular theology--and it sells books and draws listeners.  The only trouble is, it's just not the way things work for the God we know in Jesus.  As a case in point, we'll look at the curious case of Sa...

In their latest conversation exploring some of the Bible's stranger tales, pastors Erica and Steve take a look a curious episode from the end of the book of Acts.  While their fellow conversation partner Sarah can't be here for this episode, they look at a tale from Acts 28 when the apostle Paul survives a prison shipwreck, only to be bitten by a snake--and then how this moment slides into an exte...

Preachers often worry or joke about their sermons putting people to sleep, but it actually happened once, and to no less than the apostle Paul!  In a strange little episode from the book of Acts, we hear about a man named Eutychus, who falls asleep during a long sermon and falls out of a third-story window to his death--only to be raised to life again!  What are we to make of a story like this, an...