Crazy Faith Talk

In a new series for this fall, we'll be exploring some of the biggest issues and challenges that we see as hurdles for the church in the 21st century. In this first episode, we'll explore the challenge of "Christian nationalism," including what it even means, how we can love our country as Christians without building religious empires or theocracies, and why it can be so tempting...

In the midst of the COVID pandemic, many churches scrambled to offer an online way of staying connected to the congregations for worship, often with whatever resources, skills, and technology they had. In the wake of that experience, many congregations are still continuing to offer online streaming versions of their Sunday services, even though the immediate needs of a pandemic are no longer press...

So many things feel like they have changed in recent decades about our common public life: we don't read newspapers like we used to, watch movies and television as earlier generations did. Many people have online components to their work or schooling, and even many friendships are made online rather in in person. In the midst of all that change, what is worship for in the 21st century? Has it...

Can you believe it? It's our 500th episode of Crazy Faith Talk! For this week's episode, we're continuing our series looking at big questions on worship matters, and this week, we're exploring the question, "How do you (or should you) address current events in the world in congregational worship?" When a disaster strikes on Saturday and everyone has heard the news by Sund...

The church is a community that includes people of all nations, languages, and cultures across time and space, and so our worship will include songs, prayers, and ways of speaking that come from many places and cultures. At the same time, in any given congregation, we always have limits to how well we can sing in another language, or musical style, or tradition. So how do we hold these two together...

Which readings from the Scriptures do we hear on Sundays, and how are they chosen? What are the advantages of having a set schedule of readings determined long in advance, and what are the advantages of having the preacher or worship leaders select texts? How do we keep ourselves honest and hear the whole of Scripture, while also hearing things in their contexts? These are the kinds of questions f...

Some church folks have grown up memorizing older forms of English in prayer and scripture, like the "thy" and "thine" of an earlier era in the Lord's Prayer, and others are more used to modern translations and wording, whether in translations, prayers, or songs. So how do we decide when to use one version of a text and when to use another? Is older always better, or should...

In a new series here on Crazy Faith Talk, we're going to take a look questions related to our ways and patterns of worship--how and why we do things in our various traditions, how we consider frequently asked questions, and what the pros and cons of different choices are in our worship life. In this first episode, we'll take a look at whether categories like "traditional," "...

The apostle Paul mentions struggling with something he calls "a thorn in the flesh" and also a "messenger of Satan." But when he had prayed repeatedly for it to be taken away, God's response was "My grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in weakness." So what is Paul talking about, and how do we make sense of this story--and the times in our lives w...

In a particularly puzzling story from the book of First Samuel, King Saul consults a medium in the hopes of conjuring the spirit of the dead prophet Samuel for advice before a battle, even though he had just recently outlawed such magic-related practices himself! What is this story trying to tell us--is magic real? Is this really supposed to be the ghost of Samuel? What happens to us when we stop...

The book of Genesis tells the difficult story of Abraham nearly sacrificing his son Isaac to God, and yet we are left to guess how Isaac felt about all of this. How old was he in the story? Did he understand what was happening? How did this incident affect his understanding of God, or his relationship with his father? And what are we supposed to do with a story like this? Join us for another episo...

The biblical book of Jonah ends with an unanswered question: shouldn't God care about a whole city full of people (not to mention animals!), even if they are unworthy and wicked in Jonah's eyes? While many people know the first part of Jonah's story, with the great fish that swallows him, or even know about God's miraculous plant that grows up overnight to shade him, it's reall...

In Mark's Gospel, Jesus casts out a "legion" of evil spirits from a man living in Gentile territory on the far side of the Sea of Galilee, and then he sends him back to his life, family, and community whole and well, to tell everyone what God has done for him. But... whatever happened to this unnamed man? Did he and Jesus ever cross paths again? How do we live with the open-ended nat...

In a well-known (but textually curious) story, a woman who had been caught in adultery is brought to Jesus by an angry crowd of religious leaders, asking him if he supports their plan to stone her to death. Jesus' response is strange at first--he starts writing in the dirt with his finger! What's going on in this story, and why don't we know what Jesus was writing? This is where our co...

Jesus seems clear in the Gospels that his followers are called to love their enemies and to refuse to answer evil with evil, even forbidding his disciples from using their weapons to protect him in the garden on the night of his arrest. The rest of the New Testament has a profound sense of non-violence as well. But what do we do about the accounts of violence and warfare in the Old Testament, and...

The Gospels and the rest of the New Testament speak pretty clearly about the Christian hope of resurrection from the dead, while the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is a good deal more ambiguous. Sometimes those who die are said to be "gathered to their ancestors," or "go to the grave" or to be in "Sheol," which is depicted as a realm of the dead. Sometimes there is the im...

When New Testament writers see details from the story of Jesus as "fulfillments" of the Hebrew prophets, should we think of them as predictions? Are they meant to be clues hidden in the ancient writings of the Old Testament, or are the New Testament writers doing something different when they quote the Hebrew Scriptures to point to Jesus? And how can it make us better Bible readers to kn...

One of the most distinctive points of classic Christian theology is the notion of God as "Trinity"--God's existence as One Being in Three Persons, which is a way of saying that Jesus is fully God (as well as being human) and that the Spirit is also fully God. How have Christians read the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in light of the Trinity, and how is that different from how our Jewish...

Sometimes in the Bible, God is described as being the special deity of one group of people--the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And other times, the Bible emphasizes that there is only one God over all the universe. Sometimes the biblical writers speak of God like a powerful king, and sometimes like a brokenhearted spouse; sometimes like a strong shepherd, and other times like a mother h...

Sometimes in popular religion, the assumption is made that God is "mean" in the Old Testament and "nice" in the New Testament--but is that really how the Bible works? Can we learn from the witness of the early church that deliberately resisted the temptation to separate from the scriptures and story of Israel? And can we see a consistent character of God throughout the Bible? J...

Do the books of the Bible which many people go to for their end-times theology (like Revelation, Daniel, and parts of Mark) ONLY refer to distant future events? Did they mean nothing for the hearers of their original historical contexts? Is it possible that these books spoke first to their own times and places, and then also speak a word of hope for us as well? And how might that change how we und...

When Jesus comes in glory, will his personality or character have changed? Should we fear that the Suffering Servant and Prince of Peace who lays down his life at the cross and teaches love of enemies will change tactics and become a conquering king or a violent tyrant? Why might people get that idea, and what really is our hope?

Sometimes church folk envision complicated timelines of events they believe must happen in world history in order for Jesus to come back (we explored this kind of thinking in our first episode of this series), and often those timelines involve assumptions about events pertaining to the modern nation-state of Israel. And sometimes, religious voices will take verses from the Scriptures originally ab...

We've all seen the classic poster with Uncle Sam trying to recruit soldiers for previous war efforts, with his severe look and the caption, "I want you!" But is that how God operates? Does God need our help to fight some cosmic battle in the future, or is the victory already won in Christ? And when the Bible talks about wearing the "armor of God" is that for some kind of li...

From action-packed summer blockbusters to pop culture references, people use the word "Armageddon" to talk about any cataclysmic disaster, real or imagined. But what does the word actually mean, and where does it come from? In this episode, colleagues in minister Erica, Natalie, Sarah, and Steve explore the history behind this word, the misnomer that it's about a grand future battle,...