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...

I am an evangelical white Christian American.

“Revival” is a word that we say a lot in the evangelical white Christian church in America. Revive Us Again was my favorite church song when I was a boy. The evangelical Christian university I attended hosted two student “revivals” every school year.

Here are the words to one of the songs we sing most often in the evangelical church where I am a member:

We are Your church
We pray revive this earth
(We’re praying for revival)
Build Your kingdom here
Let the darkness fear
Show Your mighty hand
Heal our streets and land
Set Your church on fire
Win this nation back
Change the atmosphere
Build Your kingdom here
We pray

But what do we mean by “revival”?

What is it that we want God to revive?

I’m going to come out and say exactly what I think we mean.

When the white evangelical Christian church in America prays for “revival,” we mean we...

Dad said we were rich.

But by fifth grade, I knew the truth. We were poor.

Mom volunteered as a “room mother” for my classroom at school. She came in wearing clothes she found at Goodwill or made for herself at home. Other moms bought their clothes at the mall.

Other moms bought mall clothes for their kids, too. But my mom made me wear hand-me-downs from my cousin. I felt like Starsky & Hutch in a Miami Vice world.

In fact, my parents didn’t buy me anything. They made me buy my own stuff with my own money that I had to go earn. Every afternoon, I went on a “walk of shame,” taking newspapers door-to-door to make a few bucks. I tried to hide my face every time the cool kids rode by on their shiny new ten-speed bikes.

But the worst was our 1978 Chevy station wagon. It had more duct tape than chrome on it. Turning the steering wheel made a pulsing, shrieking sound like the love...

Before the pandemic, I went to two churches almost every week.

One church put a lot of energy, money, and time into “production values.”

I am sure that, in the other church, not one person in the pews even knows what “production values” means.

The first church recorded an album a few years ago.

Nobody is going to ask to record the second church any time soon!

The first church pays professionals to perform in worship.

At the second church, the least bad singer bravely volunteers to be the first to start singing until everyone else joins in.

Guess which church I miss the most.

I like good worship as much as the next Christian, but I love the people in the pews a hundred times more. What I’m learning from the pandemic is that I will take people over production values every time. The chitchat that happens just before and after worship means more to me than what happens between...