Christmas eve day is a peculiar day. It is a day of sitting around, being edgy, wondering what is in that package. It is a day of expectation. It is a day of hoping that what is in the wrapping is everything you dreamed, and knowing, deep down, that at some level it won’t be. […]

It’s two days before Christmas and we are reading about Easter. But let’s me more accurate, shall we? It is two days before many people celebrate the birth of Jesus and we are reading about his death. In Matthew 27:33-50, we are reading about his death. We use religious shorthand – Christmas, Easter –  to […]

It is hard to be ridiculed. To trip and dump everything on your tray, to hear silence for a moment and then laughter, that’s tough. To miss one item on the checklist and then to be teased forever about your inability to do simple things right, that’s tough. To betray God and to have your […]

Sometimes details make me wonder. As we read Matthew’s story, Jesus is carrying his cross. A man from Cyrene, named Simon, is forced to carry it for him. That’s it. We know where Simon is from. We know what he did for part of an hour of one day of his life. If we look […]

There are others that are mentioned in stories about Jesus. There are his followers, the twelve and seventy-two and thousands. But then there are the others. Judas, one of the twelve, ended up as one of the others. He expresses remorse, but he never looks for Jesus or the rest of the followers. He killed […]