Crazy Faith Talk

In their ongoing series exploring the book of Esther, pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve take a look at chapters five and six as Esther goes to the king to save her people and to defeat the crooked scheming of the villain Haman.  In a story already full of big characters and outlandish plot twists, here's a set of almost Shakespearean turns that raise the lowly and start the downfall of the crooked o...

How do we respond when something truly terrible is about to happen?  Do we ignore it and hope it doesn't affect us?  Do we make provisions for ourselves alone and hope to weather the storm?  Do we risk our comfort, our privilege, and our way of life to speak up?  These are the kinds of questions that come to the surface in the fourth chapter of Esther.  With the villainous Haman's plan to kill and...

"To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunitsts who control the fool.... to be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies."  So warns famous novelist Octavia Butler, but it just as easily could have been a commentary on the book of Esther, as well.  As pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve continue exploring this lesser-known bo...

As they move ahead in the book of Esther, pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve move onto the second chapter of this story, where we meet Esther and hear how she is chosen to be queen basically by winning a beauty pageant.  Along the way, we meet her cousin Mordecai, who will be a wise mentor, confidant, and voice of conscience for her as the story unfolds, and who helps to foil a plot against the Persi...

In a new series, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve do something they've never tried before in this podcast--to work through an entire book of the Bible, looking at what's going on in the story and how it connects to our lives, too.  We'll be exploring the biblical book of Esther, which is not only an epic thriller with life-and-death stakes for a whole nation of people ruled by a foreign empire, but...

As the close out this short series at the intersection of pop culture and faith, pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve talk about the early 2000s series, "Avatar: The Last Airbender," and how there can be a lot for grown-ups to learn about life from a show that is ostensibly aimed at kids.  As they look at the fantasy world of this TV show, the three friends around the table look at how we discern the r...

The best science fiction often takes the real world in which we live and then heightens, or stretches, some element of it as a way of looking at our actual world.  And while it can be entertaining, engrossing, or frightening, those kind of imaginary worlds can also be places for thought experiments that can stretch our faithful imagination, too.  So as our three conversation partners, Sarah, Erica...

What would it look like for church to be known first of all as a place of radical acceptance--and also one where members of the community brought out the best in each other?  And what could help us imagine what that could look like?  In a new round of conversations, pastors and colleagues in ministry Erica, Sarah, and Steve take a dive into the waters of pop culture they've been interacting with,...

Almost everything in our lives has been affected in some way or another by the COVID-19 pandemic, including major changes to what church life and ministry looks like.  As our regularly gathering conversation partners, Sarah, Erica, and Steve, explore their own reflections on ministry during the time of coronavirus, they are joined by a fourth voice around the table--Russ, who is also a pastor and...

As messy, conflicted, and complicated as families can somtimes be (as we've seen for sure over the course of this series!), the thing about family is that your belonging in it is entirely by grace.  You can't earn your family, merit your place in it, or decide to keep someone else out because of their bad behavior--in a sense, in a family, we are all blessedly "stuck" with each other.  And it turn...

We live in an age of click-bait one-dimensional internet quizzes (like, "Answer three questions to find out what personality type you have," or "Click on a picture to find out which Disney princess you are,"), and it can be easy to do the same to biblical characters, too.  For a long time, the sisterhood between Mary and Martha in the Gospels has been one of those places church folk have done some...

When a loving father gracious welcomed home his troubled son and extavagantly threw a party to celebrate his return, the older brother crosses his arms indignantly and asks his dad, "Don't ALL your sons matter?"  And of course, they do.  The father loves both of his sons, and both of his sons' needs are taken care of--but at the moment, it is the lost-but-now-found son who needs the focus.  That's...

On Crazy Faith Talk, we have always tried to be honest and real in our conversations, whether it's about our own struggles, quirks, and stories, or with the stories and issues we explore.  So as we continue our series looking at biblical brothers and sisters and how their family stories are often difficult and messy, we need to have some honest conversation about the man remembered as Israel's gre...

As they continue their series on sibing rivalries and reversals in the Bible, pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve (and a couple of unexpected comments from a dog in the background) turn to the story of young David--the kid who wasn't even considered an option for the crown by his own family, but whom God chose precisely in his smallness and lowliness.  When all the conventional wisdom said to choose a...

One of the difficult but necessary lessons of life is that while good can come out of rotten choices or circumstances, we are not off the hook with responsibility for the rotten things we do.  Someone can intend to do evil, and yet God can use it for good, as well.  In this week's episode of Crazy Faith Talk, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve take a look at the way those tensions play out in the sto...

As they keep looking at stories of sibling rivalries in the Bible, and how God turns the tables on our expectations in those stories, pastors and friends Erica, Sarah, and Steve explore the saga of Jacob and Esau, a pair of twins in the book of Genesis, who are constantly fighting and whose story takes some surprising twists.  And so does the conversation today, too, since we'll explore this Bible...

Lots of church-folk know the Bible story of how Abraham and Sarah patiently waited for a child in their old age, and then were blessed with a son, Isaac.  But we often forget (or ignore) that the Bible itself tells a more complicated, surprising, and table-turning tale.  When Abraham and Sarah doubt that God will come through for them, they take matters into their own hands and Abraham has a son w...

It's been said that the entire Bible is an extended answer to the question Cain first asks near the beginning of Genesis: "Am I my brother's keeper?"  In this new series, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve take a look at numerous stories of siblings (usually brothers) in the Bible who have rivalries between one another, and also the recurring way God reverses our expectations when there are struggles...

As they continue their series looking at practicing justice in our lives, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve take a look at justice and women today.  For a lot of human history, women have been treated as "less than" their male counterparts, or treated like they were defective, or regarded as property of men. And even though there are a lot of ways that has changed over time in many places, there are...

The old line attributed to Dr. King says that "the most segregated hour in America is still Sunday mornings at eleven o' clock."  So even though we might like to wish that "racism isn't my problem" or "racism was solved a long time ago" or "racism doesn't have to do with me, because everyone around me looks the same as I do," we--especially we who claim to be followers of Jesus--can't ignore the o...

How does it affect the way we see criminal justice if we are looking at it through the lens of the same Jesus who said, "I was a prisoner, and you visited me," and who was executed by the state as a dangerous troublemaker?  What does it mean to see the faces of the incarcerated as bearing both the face of Christ and the image of God? As they continue to look at practicing justice, pastors Erica, S...

As they continue to explore what it means to actually "do justice" in our lives today, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve take a look at what the communitarian practices of the early church in the book of Acts might say to us today.  While their situation was much different from our own, and while there is no commandment in the New Testament that Christians must all share their possessions in common...

As they continuing looking at how to "do" justice (and not just to study Bible verses "about" justice), pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve explore some of the ways the Torah and other parts of the Old Testament speak to justice in our economics and finances.  As they look at concepts like jubilee--with its cancellations of debts, freeing of slaves and indentured servanthood contracts, and restoration...

In a new series, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve start to explore what it looks like to do justice in different parts of our lives.  Building off of their earlier series on Biblical voices of  what justice looks like, now we turn to  how to do justice in our relationships with each other, with different groups of people, with creation, and with our resources.  And to start things off, we look at o...

As we make the journey this week with Christians all over the world in retelling the story of Jesus' passion, death, and resurrection, our series on the stations of the cross comes to its end.  Pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve look at the meaning of Jesus' death and burial, as well as the hope we find in the story of Jesus' resurrection.  And while many of us these days feel like we are caught in t...