Grace Unbalanced

Something interesting happens whenever I talk about grace, forgiveness, and acceptance. People push back. As much as we like those things, as much as we need those things, as much as we realize that they are central to our faith as Christians, we seem to want to qualify them. To put an asterisk by them....

Like A Slave

The is the last of a four-part series on the parable of the Prodigal Son. Read Luke 15:11-25 We have now concluded the fun part of this story. This is the part we like, the part about being found after having been lost, about becoming alive again after having been given up for dead. The part about coming...

In a Far Land

This is the second of four messages on the Prodigal Son. For last week’s message click here. Last week I attended the inaugural Frederick Buechner Religious Writer’s Workshop. If you don’t know who Frederick Buechner is, I encourage you to find out. He’s a the author of over thirty books, none of them...

The Permissive Father and Absurd Grace

The Permissive Father: A message given on June 7,2015 Today we begin a four-week series on what I believe is the greatest parable ever told, the parable of the Prodigal Son. This parable shows the absolute genius that Jesus was, because on the surface it’s a very simple story of a man who had two sons, one...

Bugs, Boys, and the Wrath of God

My father grew up on a farm in south Mississippi, which means that he grew up growing what he ate, and that he ate things like turnip greens. Ugh. I grew up on Southern cooking, but it was my mother’s Southern cooking, not my father’s, and while she also grew up in south Mississippi, she grew up in the...

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