A brother demanding his possession he had not worked for but felt he was due because of his Father’s work. After spending all his inheritance, he came to himself.
Featured Sermon
The Interim God
Eberhard Arnold
“…However sharp their differences, this is the one thing that should unite all political factions, Christians and non-Christians: the inner certainty that everything must be completely different, that what destroys solidarity and shatters trust will in the end be overcome by joy in life and fellowship in justice. For the faith we hold is in a living God.”
The Lord’s Descent into Hell
In a kind of political Holy Saturday as this week has been, it’s worth returning to the office of readings for the real one each year. “Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.”
Banquet of Love
Bill DeJong
“The Lord’s Supper is not only a taste of God’s love to nourish us; it’s also a banquet of God’s love to unite us.
There ought to be no rank at the Lord’s Supper, no hierarchy, no divisions. At the Lord’s Supper there aren’t employers and employees or teachers and students. There aren’t even husbands and wives, or parents and children. There’s only one category—believers, brothers and sisters.”
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
Martin Luther King, Jr.
“…Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement, and pray that our inner being may be sensitive to its guidance. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us…”
A Different Hope
Eberhard Arnold
Christians have long experienced the social and intellectual pressure to baptize the various “isms” of a given era. In the 1920s, German theologian Eberhard Arnold founded the Bruderhof, a community inspired by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. In this text, Arnold works out a fresh political theology that won’t just be espoused in words, but lived. He presents a different hope, a way beyond nationalism, socialism, or the status quo.
Render Unto Caesar
Anthony Elenbaas
If all human wars stem from efforts to take the place of God, what needs humbling in this particularly fraught political hour?