Matthew 2:1-12
Ephesians 3:1-12
Fox Valley Presbyterian Church
Sunday Before Epiphany
It’s been over a week since you ripped open those treasure boxes under the tree. And for the most part, you know exactly what’s in them. And now you have a sense of how much you will actually use the gift. What each gift might mean, what [...]
Genesis 9:8-17; 1 Peter 3:13-4:2
Fox Valley Presbyterian Church, Geneva, IL
March 1, 2009 (Lent 1B)
If there’s any Bible story that is truly a part of “youth cultureâ€, or at least the culture of the youngest of youth, it’s Noah and the Ark. If you do a search on Amazon for “Noah’s Ark toys†you get 303 [...]
2 Kings 5:1-14
Fox Valley Presbyterian Church, Geneva, IL
Service of Healing and Wholeness
Every once in a while, my two-year old comes up with little theological insights, new ways of explaining church-y things to herself, and one of my current favorites is the “church bathâ€. It’s what she calls the baptismal font. The place where she sees [...]
A little context: from August 2002-July 2003, I was the intern pastor at Hope Christian Reformed Church in Oak Forest, IL. Then, when I started working as the religion teacher at pastor at Providence-St. Mel Schools, Hope remained my home congregation and then was the congregation that ordained me in November of 2003. They invited [...]
Revelation 12
Fox Valley Presbyterian Church
December 21, 2008, 8:30am
Pray for us, because at the next service, we’re handing the preaching of the word over to the children. They’re doing a Christmas pageant.
Christmas pageants are not safe. Let’s be honest: when Mary is 8 and Joseph is 5 and the innkeeper is 3, you just don’t know [...]
Matthew 5:5; Romans 12:1-3; Psalm 37
Fox Valley Presbyterian Church
Twice in my life, on a bus in a foreign country, I’ve had a moment where I understood how big Americans really are.
In Guatemala, I rode a chicken bus (called chicken buses because people transport everything, including their chickens). Latin America is where North American school buses [...]
Matthew 14:22-33
Fox Valley Presbyterian Church
Everything is about high school…
That’s a line from a movie I saw recently…but what movie it was, how it played into the plot line, those things are not important…because there are so many movies and stories and books and urban myths in our culture that tell us that everything goes [...]
Isaiah 63:7-9; Hebrews 2:10-18
Fox Valley Presbyterian Church
A few weeks ago, I found myself in line at a discount store looking exactly like the Mom I thought I would never be—the one with too many Christmas presents for her kid. Looking for something entirely different, I had wandered into the children’s section and found a fantastic [...]
Last night, my latest issue of Brain, Child arrived.
There’s a great review by Kristin Kovacic of three books about teenagers (by the way, all of these books have longer titles, but I’m too lazy to type them, so click the links to see the subtitles):
The Stardust Lounge, by Deborah Digges
What It Takes to Pull Me [...]
Hebrews 11:39-12:3
Fox Valley Presbyterian Church
If we at Fox Valley Presbyterian Church needed a new pulpit Bible, we’d take out the catalog of a church supply company and place an order. Within a week, our new Bible would arrive. And that would be that.
But in the mid 1990s, the Benedictine monks of St. John’s College and [...]