The story of Christianity is the story worlds dying and worlds coming to life.

The Christian era starts with people asking Jesus of Nazareth: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Book of Acts 1:6).

God answered: “See, I am making all things new” (Book of Revelation 21:5).

Jesus got in trouble because he didn’t grant the people’s wish to go back to the way things used to be; he tried to lead them someplace they never went before–even in their dreams.

Those who chose to follow the Spirit of the Christ could barely believe the new world in which they came to live. Jews and Gentiles found themselves living together as family. They ate things they never imagined they would eat. They went places they never imagined they would go. They worshiped in ways they never imagined they would worship.

Even Saul of Tarsus, a Jew’s Jew educated and trained to...

I like to look at a photograph of my wife in her wedding dress.

Oh, boy. Let me tell you. I never get tired of that image. Looking at it, I go back over every detail about the way she looked on our wedding day. That memory is a well from which I enjoy drinking almost daily.

As much as that wedding picture means to me and as much as I think about it, there is an image of my wife that means a hundred times more.

It is the way she looks at the end of the day or when she first gets up in the morning. It’s when she’s in what she calls her “grubbies.”

When I see my wife in her grubbies, I have two thoughts:

1. I am jealous. It’s not fair that her beauty is so natural that she can look so good when she’s not even trying. It takes me great effort and time just to get presentable for the public. All she has to do is roll out of bed.

2. I’m the only one in the world who gets to see her like...

The Christ went looking for broken things.

He found them and put them back together again.

It was neither a magic trick nor an “object lesson,” but his passion and purpose in life. Healing got the Christ out of bed in the morning.

In today’s church of Christ, we mostly think of healing as something for persons. That is, the Christ heals the things that break a person.

That is true.

But the ancient church of Christ thought that healing was for peoples.

One early teacher in the church of Christ wrote:

“For [the Christ] is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us” (Letter to the Christians in Ephesus, chapter 2, verse 14).

Here in 2021, we Christians need to spend time with this.

In my branch of the Christian family tree, we are eager to find broken persons to lead to the Christ who can heal...

When the Christ lived as a human being, he befriended people who most people knew not to befriend.

He said things that most people dared not say. Things like: “Your sins are forgiven.”

He touched people that most people knew better than to touch.

He went places that most people were smart enough to avoid.

Just look at him in the Gospels: Always doing or saying the wrong things with the wrong people in the wrong places.

His love made him do it. It turns out that the Christ loves those in the wrong as much as he loves those in the right.

Those “in the right,” however, didn’t think they needed a Christ. So the Christ went to those who were so far gone they already gave up on a Christ ever coming for them.

What a surprise the Christ turned out to be!

These days, who are the people most of us know not to befriend?

These days, what are the things people are aching to hear, but...

Easter is not for Christians; Easter is for everyone.

The one we Christians call our Christ once said of God: “He makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous” (Gospel of Matthew 5:45).

Why? Because, the Christ said, God loves everyone.

The life and love God gives, God gives to all. Cheerfully. Freely. Giddily. Recklessly. Wastefully (as some would say), but what good is omnipotence if one can’t use it on something like love?

No matter your ethnicity, your morals, your nationality, your politics, or your religion, the sun (Son) rises on you. It is God’s pleasure to love you this way.

Nobody can tell you the sun won’t rise, so don’t let anyone tell you that the Son did not rise for you and will not rise for you again and again and again.

Happy Easter.

Even in her wildest dreams, a sunflower seed cannot imagine that she will become a sunflower someday.

She does not even know the meaning of “sunflower.”

All she knows is that she is a seed. She was born a seed, lives as a seed, and will go into the ground as a seed.

Easter is not about a seed going into the ground and coming back out as the same seed that went in.

Easter is the story of a seed becoming a sunflower.

It is not the story of one seed only; it is the story of the First Seed.

It is the start of our own seed stories.

Easter shows us what we will become after we go into the ground.

It is a sign that we are the seeds from which God will grow a new Eden.

The First Seed is risen out of the ground!

Indeed, the First Seed is growing up.

Our own rising out of the ground is soon to come.

Grace and peace.

I’ve lived my whole life among “Bible people.”

The Church of Christ, my branch of the Christian family tree, takes pride in being a “Bible-believing church.” Church of Christ lifers over the age of 40 remember when we called ourselves the “People of the Book.” Anyone who grows up in the Church of Christ knows that something isn’t true unless it has a “book, chapter, and verse” to back it up.

The Church of Christ congregation where I grew up turned Bible study into a sport. Every year, we fielded teams at a “Bible bowl.” At the “Bible bowl,” teams from Church of Christ congregations all over the state went head-to-head to test their mastery of Bible trivia. Our congregation placed or won every year. We had the trophies in our church lobby to prove it.

In the Church of Christ, one of our favorite Bible verses is Hebrews 4:12:

Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper...

Oh, how we want Jesus Christ to pick a political side!

That’s what the people in his day wanted, too. They wanted to know if he was on their political side.

But he wouldn’t pick a side. He wouldn’t join them.

So they beat him. Then they killed him.

If Jesus’s first miracle was turning water into wine, his last miracle was turning political enemies into friends.

The Pharisees and Sadducees buried the hatchet so they could hack Jesus down together.

Herod and Pilate, bitter political rivals who hated each other, “became friends” just so they could put Jesus to death.

I wonder: If political enemies turned into political allies to get rid of the Christ back then, why are Democrats and Republicans not getting together to get rid of the church of Christ today?

If we Christians are like our namesake Christ, why aren’t BLM and MAGA getting together to protest against us? Why...

The Christ said that if we can’t do anything else, just love neighbors, strangers, and enemies. If we can give a drink of water to someone we’d rather drown in it, we are Christian enough.

If this is true, what kind of church should I join?

Shouldn’t I join a church that has the kind of people in it who put my love to the test?

My wife and I think we will go back to church this year. The last time we went to church was March 2020. We had more than a year to think about how church could be different next time. We seem to talk about this every Sunday after we “watch church” on YouTube.

We talk about things we miss about our church and things we don’t miss.

We talk about things we wish our church would do better and things we wish our church would not do at all.

We talk about people at church who get on our nerves.

I confess that we talk about people we wish would just go...

My wife and I joke that we don’t want to live in a world where Harrison Ford gets old.

But Harrison Ford is getting old and he’s not the only one. Here in “midlife,” people who were “always there” are starting to not be there anymore.

For the first time in my life, I can’t deny that a time is coming when everyone who was “always there” won’t be there at all.

I see a world coming that is empty of the people who made my world.

On the night before I graduated from Christian college, I hung out with a buddy of mine who lived next door to me in the dorm. We rode around town in his Chevy pickup truck. We talked about what we were going to do with the grownup lives we were about to begin. I had a job lined up at a Fortune 500 company. He had a scholarship to go to grad school. He wanted to be an English professor at the same Christian college that would give us our degrees the next day...