For the next several weeks we are going to be in the books of Ezekiel and Daniel. I have never studied or taught either of them. Likely, some of you have spent more time in each of them than I have. So, I am a beginner. What Thomas Merton said is true:  We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!  It would be far easier to skip the assignment and tell myself that at this point in my life it makes more sense to go back to what is familiar and work…

Let’s start with a few facts and a little history. This week Americans will eat 365 million pounds of turkey; 250 million pounds of potatoes; 77 million pounds of ham; 17 million pounds of fresh cranberries; spend $42 million on canned cranberries; spend $96 million on bread crumbs for stuffing; and purchase 483,000 pounds of pumpkins for pie. That doesn’t include everything else we have like olives, pickles, pecan pie, and millions of marshmallows for 57 million pounds of sweet potatoes we will eat. That’s a long way from the original Thanksgiving dinner celebrated by the 50 survivors of the original 102 passengers of the Mayflower in 1621. They were…

Here we are at the end of one of the several letters Paul has written from his two year imprisonment in Rome – Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians, Titus and Philemon. As we’ve said before, prison produces different effects in people. For some, they give themselves up to bitterness and resentment. For others, their lives are permanently dulled and slowly destroyed. For some, however, it produces greatness. Victor Frankl wrote of his confinement in the German death camp during WWII: The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult…

It’s remarkable to me that Paul can move so quickly from arguing against the heresy of Gnosticism and how Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation to the most practical human concerns and relationships. He is not a scholar in the ivory tower. “For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things hold together..For God was pleased  to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile…

Doesn’t it seem a bit ironic that after telling them to avoid people who have lists of rules to obey he would then create a list of rules of his own for us to follow? Paul was a teacher and teachers often depend on lists – especially lists that people can easily memorize and use as guides for their behavior. Of course, the shorter the better but sometimes Paul had fairly lengthy lists that we often had to recite in Sunday School. There are negative lists: Romans 1:  They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice.…