Text: Genesis 1:1-2:4 Trinity Sunday is the one Sunday a year where preachers have the opportunity to instruct their congregations on the doctrine of the Trinity, that teaching of the church which tells us that God is somehow both one God yet also three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So that leaves us …
Acts 2:1-21 One hundred and eleven years ago, in Los Angeles, California, in an abandoned AME church in downtown, the one-eyed son of former slaves led a revival that would ignite the whole world. The people involved believed they were experiencing a last-days outpouring of the Spirit, signified by their speaking in unknown tongues. Most …
Like many people my age, I struggle with an impulsive need to look at my smart phone. I found myself looking at mostly banal things, and I began to suspect the constant looking at silly vacuity on a screen was eating away at my brain. I had a difficult time concentrating on anything for an extended period …
Take Up and Read: Laying Down the Phone and Picking Up the Bible Read More »
I never watch the Grammy Awards, mostly because they do not feature much music that I like. This last Sunday’s award show promised a rare exception: a seemingly odd pairing of Metallica and Lady Gaga. Metallica was the first metal band I ever loved. True, when I first found them, they were in the midst …
I spent many of my formative years in an assortment of Pentecostal churches across the state of Mississippi. They were the old-school, holiness variety, where matriarchs with tall buns would experience sudden shocks of emotion, standing, shouting, running all over the sanctuary, raining bobby pins wherever they went. On certain occasions, they would call those …
I was a teenager when I preached my first sermon. The church was a small Pentecostal congregation in Mississippi, the pulpit was my father’s, and the text was Acts 2. It wasn’t a bad sermon; it barely had any time to be. The sermon ran hardly more than a few minutes, consisting mostly of half-baked …
Among comic book characters, Aquaman has the dubious distinction of being both one of a handful of comic book characters the average non-comics reader can name without a Google search as well as being, throughout his history, a character whose name power hasn’t translated into publishing success. While other Golden Age characters like Batman and …
As 2015 ends and 2016 begins, I thought it would be fun to do a year-end list, a staple of blogging that I have never attempted before. Here are a few of the things I enjoyed in 2015: Best Film: Mad Max: Fury Road. Many of you who know me well may have expected to answer …
“Regarding as nothing the things that most people value and rising above them, we live as in paradise, or rather as in heaven, set free from all constraints through our untroubled devotion to God.” – The Philokalia It is trendy now, among my fellow Millenials, to live with fewer possessions, a practice known simply (appropriately) …
I haven’t always held a very high view of the Eucharist. The Lord’s Supper was, for me, a symbol, as it is for many other Evangelicals and Pentecostals. I never seriously considered any different understanding of it. Despite the mighty shifts that shook my faith in my late teens and early twenties, my sacramental theology remained …
