Glimpses of Glory

This is an edited version of a sermon preached at First Baptist Church, Forest City, NC, on March 6, 2011. The text is the Transfiguration from Matthew 17:1-13.

Jubilee Economics

A lot of people who know nothing about the church or the Bible have recently taken to co-opting a biblical term and using it in the context of the current fiscal calamity that augurs what some suggest is our impending global economic ruin; namely, Jubilee. Nouriel Roubini, the Turkish-born, Harvard-trained, American economist who is a professor of international economics at NYU’s Stern School of Business, suggested recently that the single most effective stratagem which the US could undertake to staunch the global economic hemorrhage would be to grant a “Jubilee” to the more than one-half of Americans who are currently underwater on their mortgages (who owe more than their home is worth).

Moving

Be back soon.

An Argument for the Antiquated

Fred Craddock said that the mind is like a hallway in an art gallery with pictures hanging on it, and under each picture is a word identifying the subject of the picture. So that if I say a word, you get a picture. “Nun,” “Southerner,” “Doctor,” “Homeless.” The problem is, we don’t all have the same pictures hanging on the walls of our minds! Hence, we use words, thinking that we’re communicating clearly because we have a clear “picture” in mind of what we’re talking about, but the other person has a different picture.

Any News From Headquarters?

Occasionally someone will say to me: “So-and-so is a really good preacher.” As one who has been interested in preaching for over forty years, that gets my attention. Sometimes I probe deeper: “Really? How so? What is there about his preaching that makes it good?” Typically that gets a blank stare, but when someone does venture a response, it usually comes out something like this: “Well, I found it relevant to my needs, where I am in my life, my home, my job, my family” and so on. That seems to be the sole criterion for “good preaching” these days – I found it relevant to where I am at this point in my life. Or, to say it another way, “It helped me to get along better in the world.” To put it succinctly, good preaching these days is defined as a spiritual “Dear Abbey” column, and a good preacher is a sort of “pious Dr. Phil.”