Todays Thought Archives - Calvary United Church of Christ

Todays Thought

November 24, 2020

I am a progressive Christian. I have grown tired of the silos we use to define ourselves. Words like “liberal” and “conservative” have little meaning to me, and yet they are used, mostly, as insults. Ridiculous! The words themselves are good words – to be liberal is to believe that people are free to live…

November 23, 2020

Accepting Differences The Bible is full of contradictions: some of them are meaningful, and some of them are divisive. One of the most interesting same, but not the same, comparisons is the following: In Matthew 12 & Luke 11, Jesus tells the crowd, “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not…

November 20, 2020

Knowing What You Know, and What You Don’t Know One of the things I spend a lot of time doing is counseling with people about spiritual (and other) issues. The variety of topics is amazing: from cooking tips to which Bible to buy, I have had a lot of conversations over the years. I am…

November 19, 2020

Church Bells Some years ago I was able to accompany my wife to Vienna for a business trip. It was the first time to Europe for both of us, and even though she had to work, we made the most of it. We stayed in a really nice place in the north part of the…

November 12, 2020

Intolerant of Intolerance It must be 10 years ago or so that a member of my congregation – now an ex-member – was upset with me about a sermon I had preached. He said that his issue with it was that I was intolerant (how I dislike that word) of those who were bigots and…

November 11, 2020

Doers, Not Just Hearers My sermon in 2 weeks will address this a bit more deeply, but today I want to think about the often fraught divide in the church around faith and works. The rallying cry of the first Protestant Reformation (Lutherans, UCC, Presbyterians, etal) focused on the idea that works (indulgences, for example)…

November 10, 2020

Today’s Thought – Religious Arrogance This past Sunday we took a ride just to get out of the house and see some scenery. We live in a lovely part of Pennsylvania – Berks County – with rolling hills and gigantic trees and streams and rivers and lakes. It is a great place for hunting (which…

November 9, 2020

Why is Sexism still a thing? Maybe I am naive – or not too quick – or too optimistic – but why is sexism still a thing? This past week we watched “I Am Woman”, a Netflix biopic about Helen Reddy, the great Australian singer who died this past September. She had a lot of…

November 6, 2020

Healing – I can honestly say that I did not grow up in a setting that was rife with racism against people of color. My father was anti-Semitic – he blamed “the Jews” for his lack of success, and shared it at home regularly. I quickly dismissed this as nonsense – the vast majority of…

November 5th, 2020

The phrase “We stand on the shoulders of giants who have gone before us” is often attributed to Martin L. King, Jr, but the earliest known use of the term comes from a letter written by Sir Isaac Newton in 1676 to his rival, Robert Hooke. In this letter, Newton spoke of his own achievements…