First Baptist Church Greensboro: Recent Episodes
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"This is a story of conversion. Three conversions, actually. There's Cornelius, there's Peter, and then there's the early church that has to reckon with this fence-moving, boundary-expanding, wild goose chase they now find themselves on. They have to decide if their customs and conventions, their comfortable categories, their understandings of insider and outsider will prevail, or if they’ll come to believe that God's Spirit is doing something new."
"This story is sometimes called 'the forgotten resurrection.' I wonder if that's because it's not a miracle of Jesus, but a miracle of the church that Jesus leaves behind. Tabitha is lifted to life by someone like us. It’s much easier to imagine such power distant from us, coming from the person of Jesus rather than through our lives. It’s far easier, actually, to just leave it all up to Jesus, rather than responding to the needs that call to us, 'Please, come without delay.' Perhaps we overlook this story, because it’s a story about us."
"Whatever your calling, wherever you meet God, wherever you hear God inviting you to, remember that you are not alone. That even when we feel the odds are against us, even when reality is brutal, even when we feel this world is a lost cause, God is always surprising us. God is always on the move, that what we know what we see is not the final say. That God is not done with this world and neither are we."
"It’s not a private gospel, it’s not a private church, and it’s not a private pool." Alan Sherouse
"Anytime there is something to celebrate and claim about who we are. Anywhere there is something that brings pride. Anytime we stand up and find we are close to the gospel. Anytime that happens, there is always somewhere behind it someone who has been bold and courageous. Someone who has 'risked something big for something good.' Someone who has been willing to give for something greater than themselves. Anytime the church gets it right, somewhere there is someone who has followed Christ's call to be a witness."
"How radical it would be if more of us looked more like shepherds. But so often in our preoccupation with power, we don’t practice vulnerability and life alongside one another. So often in our fixation on security and our fears of what’s ahead, we don’t give our lives away for others. In our conformity to the patterns of this world we don’t use the gifts of God for the sake of a wider community and call. Maybe that’s why when Jesus is asked by the crowds to tell them plainly if he is the Messiah, he tells them that he is a Shepherd. What could be more saving than that kind of vulnerable and inclusive love?"
“There’s no way of knowing what exactly God was up to in between the tragedy of Friday and the breaking dawn of Easter morn. But if you’ve ever felt like you’ve descended into shadow and despair, maybe you can believe today that God in Christ has been there, too. If you’ve ever felt almost like you were in hell, maybe you can believe today that there is a way back.”
"This Palm Sunday, we share our grief and outrage at yet another episode of gun violence, and its reminder that we have proven willing to sacrifice our children for some emblem — an idol really — of personal freedom. Our children feel this, you know. They carry it. And I feel it along with them. I feel it along with our teachers, our school counselors, our educators in our own church school. I feel it as a parent, along with every one of you that is a trusted adult in the life of a vulnerable child. But don't you feel it in a particular way as a Christian?
The epidemic of gun violence is not merely a political problem, a moral problem, or an ethical problem. It is a religious problem. It is so often rooted in a distortion of the way of Jesus — who declined the warhorse and rode the donkey into Jerusalem, who said 'Let the children come to me,' who said 'When you care for the most vulnerable in this world you are meeting me,' who came to us exposed and vulnerable. As a child.
On Palm Sunday, we choose our way. And we do not merely have a choice between the way of Christianity and the ways of this world. We have a choice between competing visions of what it actually means to follow the way of Jesus."
"Standing at his friend’s tomb, Jesus can already imagine another. He's on his way there, in fact – a final visit to the city, a last supper, a looming cross, a stone. When his followers are amidst the tombs of Jerusalem, he wants them to remember Bethany. When they can only see death and are tempted to hole up in fear and finality, he wants them to remember Lazarus, and to think of a time when they thought it was all over and somehow amidst the cold stones of what they'd always known, there was new life."
"John tells of a sweeping, expansive work of Jesus. It's one of those 'signs' in John, telling us who Jesus is and something of who we are because of that. And do you notice how quickly all of that becomes too large for the world that surrounds? Because the miracles of Jesus cross boundaries — challenging our limits of who is worthy, what is possible, where and when and by whom the miraculous can occur. They leave us standing around with our tape measures, wondering if our carefully constructed views of the world and our tightly held understandings of the divine have enough space for what has just happened — what God in Christ has done."
"Whatever your struggle. Whatever your pain. Whatever your trauma or unhealthy life experiences, Christ desires to fill your soul. There is no need to hide. There is no need for shame. There is only the need to drink of the water that slakes all thirst. There is only the need to turn to the one who sees us, knows us, and who promises to fill our souls with a Living Water that will never run dry."