Because We Are Friends and Brothers
 
Early on in our conversations, the pastor nominating committee told me about the annual joint service with First Baptist Church that’s been held every Labor Day weekend for the past dozen years or so. Everyone agrees that it is a significant event and one in which we take appropriate pride and joy. A few months after I arrived, Keith Pacheco was kind enough to share some of the details of the events, how it grew out of a desire to take seriously our call to racial reconciliation. The idea of a mostly-white congregation worshiping with a mostly-black congregation is a good idea. Continue reading →

No Greater Joy
 

“I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.” So writes the Apostle John.  John, of course, was thinking of his spiritual children, those he had pastored for so many years, many of whom had come to faith in Christ through his faithful ministry.  I’m going to take the figurative back to the literal this week as our son Christopher and his wife Katie visit with Becky and me this weekend. Christopher and Katie leave for Italy on September 5. They are spending Christopher’s final fall semester of his Notre Dame architecture program in Rome (and we’re planning on a November visit!). Of course we’re eager to show off a little bit of Philadelphia and Bucks County and especially anxious to have them meet some of you – they have heard a lot about our wonderful LPC family. Continue reading →

All the World Loves a Winner

I am writing on Friday morning and so far Michael Phelps has won six gold medals in the six Olympic events in which he has thus far competed.  Two more to go; the 100-meter fly tomorrow and the 400-meter medley on Sunday. The media is wondering if he is the greatest Olympian ever. 

Who knows?  What is grreatness?  Maybe Jesse Owens whose four gold medals in Berlin reminded Hitler and the Nazis that the master race may not have been so masterful after all was the greatest Olympian ever.  Maybe it was Eric Liddell, the Flying Scotsman and later missionary to China, who refused to run his best event, the 100-meter race, on a Sunday in the 1924 Paris Games because it would have violated his faithful observance of the Sabbath. Maybe it was some athlete none of us have ever heard of who overcame personal or social or political obstacles just to compete and quietly showed a courage and valor that many medal winners never match.  Who knows who the greatest Olympian was or is? Continue reading →

When Sorrows Like Sea Billows Roll

We will continue with our Sunday morning series on the life of Joseph and have come to that turn in the story when suddenly things are going very well for Joseph.  From pit and prison we will watch as he rises to the position of prime minister of all of Egypt.  One of the companion texts for the sermon is Jesus’ saying in Mark 10:29-30  where he makes a seemingly preposterous promise to reward the faithful a hundredfold for any losses incurred for the sake of the gospel.  It is a text greatly abused by the promoters of the health and wealth gospel, the “name it, claim it” lie of the televangelists.  But it is promise of our Lord and there are others like it.  Blessings, the rewards of faith, are never in the Bible just a thing of “pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye.”  “O taste and see, that the Lord is good,” the Psalmist says. God’s blessings are visible.  We can taste them. Continue reading →

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

I want to think a little bit about what you and I see when we look into the mirror, but first, a little background: Continue reading →