This day of remembrance in the Jewish year celebrates not only escape from certain death but strength for a long journey ahead. Nine plagues had already come, each a response to...

Jesus asks a lot from us. Well, more to the point, he asks everything. If we want to follow him, we must deny ourselves. We have to be ready to die....

Pretty much every corner of the world screams to us, “Might makes right!” We are told relentlessly to get whatever we can, that more is better. For centuries, humans have understood...

The world around us teaches us to keep score. We are trained to hope that people get what they deserve, no more and no less. We hear lots of talk about...

It’s easy to talk about love. It’s not so easy to practice what we preach. When Jesus told us to love others as he first loved us, this was no saccharine,...

This psalm recounts the glorious deeds of God from the past. The first verse calls us to “give thanks to the Lord; call on his name; make known his deeds among...

As Moses meets the true and living God at the burning bush, God speaks to Moses, summoning him to lead his people to freedom. Every single thing about this was unexpected....

When the curtain rises on our scene from Exodus, Moses is taking care of his father-in-law’s sheep. Looking after a flock was a pretty big job, made all the more complicated...

If the Lord had not been on our side . . .” (NIV). The psalm names the many catastrophes that could easily have befallen Israel but didn’t: being devoured alive, swept...

As we move further into the twenty-first century, Christians are reclaiming our bodies as part of our faith life. In the twentieth century, much of Christianity focused on the neck-up, as...