Crazy Faith Talk

Oscar Wilde once wrote, "?How else but through a broken heart can Lord Christ enter in?"  Even though Christians are unapologetically "Easter People" who are charged with sharing the Good News of resurrection with the world, we are also called not just to rejoice with those who rejoice, but to "weep with those who weep," and to be honest in our prayer and worship lives... which means being able to...

As pastors Erica and Steve continue their exploration of what we think is happening in Christian worship, they explore what it means to pray "together" and how prayer can be authentic, even when we are borrowing someone else's words--whether a leader offering prayer in the same room, or the sometimes centuries-old words of older sisters and brothers in the faith, or even the pattern we call "The L...

In their ongoing series about what Christian worship looks like, and what followers of Jesus think they are doing when they gather week by week, pastors Erica and Steve keep unpacking the ancient patterns of Christian worship.  Like a symphony in four movements, we begin with Gathering, and then the Word, and then some response to the Word--often involving the Meal of Christ's followers called Hol...

Of all the things you could do on Sunday mornings, why do Christians gather around ancient texts that have been told for thousands of years, and why do they set aside time and space to hear stories they have heard, sometimes for all their lives?  What do we think is happening in Sunday worship?  Pastors Erica and Steve continue looking at the ancient patterns of worship that shape our Sunday gathe...

We don't "go to church" because God's ego needs stroking, and we don't show up in worship to be entertained like an audience watching a football game or a musical.  But in this set-apart space and time, we meet the living God along with a whole mess of God's people... in order to be re-storied?.  We gather in praise of the God who went to a cross for us and who walks through the valley of the shad...

In this second episode of their new series on Worship Whys, pastors Erica and Steve look at the way the God the Old and New Testament resists being permanently put in a box, whether a temple or tabernacle, a ritual or a rigid style.  That means that God's people will always have the freedom to borrow the patterns of the world around us in our worship life, but also always have the calling to run c...

For more than two thousand years, Christians have gathered together on Sundays for some variation of the same event--gathering in corporate worship of Jesus of Nazareth.  But... worship really isn't a consumer product or a performance for me to watch passively as an audience member.  And the God we meet in Jesus doesn't seem to be so emotionally needy as to require contast reminder of God's own gr...

In this final episode of their Big Questions series, pastors Erica and Steve take a look at the story of Jesus' resurrection, the history of how the Empty Tomb got entangled with bunnies and flowers and spring time, and why Christians believe that the message of Jesus' coming back to life is good news for everybody, not just Jesus.  How is the story of Jesus' death and resurrection different from...

If praying is not the same as making wishes to a genie, and if God already knows what I need before I ask it out loud.... why do Christians say we pray?  What's the point of prayer, if God reserves the right to answer as we ask... ?or? to answer differently?  What do we think we are doing when we pray if it's not informing the Divine about new factual information?  And after getting tired of heari...

Choices with family life, decisions about work, dilemmas about how to deal with tough situations among friends or neighbors.  It's hard to know how to decide, and what voices to listen to in life.  Christians often talk about listening for God's voice, and we tell stories and sing songs about hearing God's call in our lives, but how do we tell if the gut impulse we feel is really God, or just our...

Okay, so the Bible--this ancient library of stories, poems, prayers, biographies, letters, and more--is important for getting to know who God is... where do I even begin to wade into it?  How do we know if we are anywhere in the ballpark of what a given passage, verse, or author is getting at? Pastors Erica and Steve continue their series of "Big Questions" by raising issues like understanding the...

In their ongoing series looking at Big Questions, especially "Big Questions" of life for people drawn to following Jesus, pastors Erica and Steve look at the question, "Why Scripture?"  What do Christians think the Bible is?  How does the Bible have authority, and what does that authority mean?  What does it mean for something that is basically a story? to have authority for people, removed from t...

One of the fastest-growing categories of religious identity in our culture is "none"--that is, people who say they have no? religious identity.  And yet, at the same time, we are bombarded with countless choices, voices, and groups to pick from of religion, spirituality, faith, philosophy, and self-help.  And in an age in which people can pick and choose, buffet-style, from what they like around t...

As we talk about God and suffering, it becomes clear that Christians don't just believe in a generic "Supremem Being" called "God" and then tack on Jesus as a footnote, but rather Jesus is key to understanding what "God" means.  And that means that the vulnerability, suffering love, death and resurrection we meet in Jesus is part of God's answer to the question of why bad things happen.  Jesus sho...

It's been said that making sense of evil in the world while believing in the God of the Bible is like trying to hold three oranges in your hand at the same time.  Christians have classically tried to say three things about God and the nature of suffering at the same time, and sometimes it seems impossible to hold all three at any one time.  For one, Christians have classically said that God is all...

Whether Christian or not, religious or not, "spiritual" or not, at some point everybody wrestles with the problem of evil, and why bad things happen in life.  Is there something called "justice," is it all random? Is there any guarantee that good wins in the end, and does some force, govern everything that happens in the world?  Followers of Jesus ask the same questions, of course, but have the ch...

After the angels and shepherds go back home, what happens next to the child from the manger?  In today’s episode of Crazy Faith Talk, pastors Erica and Steve take a look at another telling of the story of Jesus’ birth—one without any shepherds or mangers, but with a star in the sky, a fearful paranoid puppet-king, and traveling strangers from far away.  And even though we may be tempted to tame th...

We have a way of sentimentalizing the Christmas story and imagining the news of Jesus’ birth was harmless and disconnected from the world in which Jesus and his family lived, like a self-contained little scene in a snow-globe.  But when the Luke the storyteller recounts the birth of Jesus, he is well aware of the struggles of empires and the political messages of Caesar, the Roman ruler who saw hi...

Pastors Erica and Steve take a closer look at a scene from Luke's gospel that feels like a musical, complete with characters breaking into song.  And just like in a musical, where the motion of the plot often stops in order to go deeper into what a character is feeling or thinking at the moment, Mary's song--sometimes called "the Magnificat," is one of those moments where the story of Jesus pauses...

Everybody says they remember the line, "Play it again, Sam," from the movie Casablanca?, but it turns out that Humphrey Bogart's Rick doesn't ever say those exact words--and neither does anybody else!  We have a way of ?thinking? we know how a story goes, and can end up either misunderstanding, misreading, or even inventing details that weren't quite there.  Maybe it's no big deal if we do it with...

Sometimes we get a picture in our head of how we think God "has" to act... and then God surprises us.  It's there at the heart of the Christian faith--in the midst of expectations of a king to liberate the people like David from Israel's collective memory, there comes Jesus of Nazareth, who defies expectations and announces God's Reign, not by overthrowing the Romans in a bloody revolt, but right...

In this last of our series on "Weird Bible Stories," pastors Erica and Steve delve into a strange little story from the wilderness days of the people of Israel in the book of Numbers.  An enemy king is afraid of the Israelites, and so he pays a prophet-for-hire to do his bidding and speak a curse on them.  But when the prophet for hire, a guy named Balaam, is on the way to speak his paid message,...

When somebody claims to speak for God, it makes our ears prick up. Sometimes it's because we think they really have something to say, and sometimes it's becasue we have heard too many charlatans, fakers, and religious snake-oil salesmen, and we are upset when someone panders and tricks people by saying they have "a word from the Lord." The prophets of Israel had the same challenge--too many court...

We live in a world of contracts, deals, and terms-of-service agreements. We sign or stamp or notarize important documents, and the world in which we live makes a big fuss over those who proclaim themselves to be expert "deal makers" who squeeze others to get more out of them.  And then there is the surprising God of the Bible, who cuts a strange kind of deal... by giving away everything, and makin...

As Erica and Steve continue exploring Bible stories that make us scratch our heads, we explore the lesser-known, but vitally important, second half of the story of Jonah, that ends with an object lesson featuring a bean plant that grows up over night, a divinely-appointed worm, and God's surprising love for the ones labeled "the enemy."  We'll see that the God we meet, not just in Jonah's story, b...