Today we expand our approach to understanding how Christ’s life set us right with God.

The Bible uses different images to talk about what Christ accomplished on the cross. Today we look at the image of the scapegoat.

Scripture teaches us that God chose us before the beginning of time… that has serious implications for how we see ourselves.

The cross has been understood many ways over the centuries - but James Cone points us to one of the ways it absolutely must be understood today in America.

Today we reflect on the Juneteenth prayer we spent time in yesterday at church, continuing to thank God for freedom and asking God for the grace to participate in the continuing work of justice.

Today we pray through the thoughtful prayer from our Sunday service.

If we are gentle with our doubt, instead of overcompensating and trying to banish it, we might just find that it’s a window to faith.

Questioning God. Pushing back against God. These are bad things, right? Well, not if you look at the amazing example of the woman at the well. Maybe we should learn from her.

The woman at the well disrupts out simplistic systems for categorizing people (and reveals how biased they are!)

There’s a real temptation to pigeonhole people - it reduces our cognitive dissonance if we can fit them into some preexisting box so we don’t have to put all the energy into receiving them as they are. Jesus takes a different approach.

Today’s poem was written almost a thousand years ago by an old monk trying to help people stay connected with God not just through scholarship but through embracing mystery.

It can be too easy for the church to just keep doing what it’s always done… but Jesus models for us a willingness to grow and change for the sake of the world.

It would be offensive and perhaps threatening to say that Jesus wasn’t perfect. And yet that’s exactly what the Bible says - but in a way that’s hopeful and in no way says that Jesus was corrupted.

The gospel writers have their own agendas in writing… and in the passage for today we see how Matthew’s agenda was unhelpful (except to help us admit our own biases).

This is the prayer that Laura Lacombe led the church in on Sunday - fully of passion and pain and boldness.

Jesus doesn’t wander through the world aimlessly. He’s constantly situating himself in the story of God’s relationship to the people.

All of the rabbis in the time of Jesus (just like pastors today!) had their own perspective on what was most important to stress from their bible. What did Jesus choose?

Today we break down the three components of compassion.

Too often the compassion of Jesus has been defaced by religious people who have been far less than compassionate. What if we got back to the original compassion of Jesus?