Today's Scripture I often meet people who are troubled to find that Jesus calls Satan the 'ruler of this world'. But as I wrote recently, the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ makes Satan a lame-duck ruler. As Jesus says: He has no power over me. If Satan has no power over Jesus, then He has no power over us if we cling to Jesus as our Lord and Savior. As many of you know, my favorite contemporary Christian band is Rend Collective and they have a song entitled:

Today's Scripture Christian author and speaker Alan Hirsch has developed a system of personal ministry style assessment based on Ephesians chapter four where Paul says that some are given as Apostles, some as Prophets, some as Evangelists, some as Shepherds, and some as Teachers. In his simple and beautiful way of examining our own calling, the word that Alan uses to most directly describe the 'Apostle' ministry style is 'Sent.' Apostles are the sent ones. They seem to be abl

Today's Scripture Let’s play a little game of sentence completion. I’ll start a sentence and you can provide the appropriate conclusion. Here it goes: “No one has greater love than to... Oh, you nailed it. When we hear this quote from Christ in John’s Gospel today, we most commonly think of Jesus laying down his life for us in the crucifixion, or anyone who dies to save another. This is not always the case. Sometimes laying down one’s life is a day-by-day process where acts o

Today's Scripture It is what we truly want. It is what our heart yearns for. It is the imagined end of every pursuit of our lives. We plan, sweat, toil, concentrate and contemplate over it. There is no question about it, what we are pursuing with our every action of our lives is happiness. I want to be clear about something though. While a 'feeling' of happiness, a smile, a bounce in our step, is an indicator - it is not the real thing. We can feel this fleeting, superficial

Today's Scripture I have to admit that today's Gospel can leave you wondering who is wielding the pruning shears. First we hear: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and everyone that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit." Ahhh - so the Father does the pruning. OK. Then we hear this: "You are already pruned because of the word that I spoke to you." Oh, so the Word prunes us?? Well it is sharp

Today's Scripture For me, personally, I think that I have found it difficult to read the words that Jesus speaks in today's Gospel, when He calls Satan 'the ruler of this world'. I always wanted to believe that Jesus was the ruler of this world - what gives? As I searched for answers, I learned that Jesus had reduced Satan to a lame duck. From a political perspective, a lame duck is one who knows he has lost his office, who won't continue in his position. Many spend this time

Today's Scripture In the last few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about what the Apostles and early Christians went through to establish what we, if we are honest with ourselves, take for granted today. A printed Bible, a Liturgy with readings and song and prayer, Sacraments. In the Acts of the Apostles, just before the Apostles decide to ordain Stephen and his companions as deacons to help with distribution of food, the Apostles recognize that they have a very important fu

Today's Scripture Often times, as Christians, we get a sense of what Jesus says, and we build our belief on that. The Father has sent me, God loves you, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, love God with all your heart, your mind, your soul and your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. All of these are beautiful and central teachings of Jesus. We would do well to follow them. But Jesus also says: ‘if you love me, you will follow my commandments’ and ‘make discip

Today's Scripture There are two fairly common human experiences that this morning's Gospel brought to mind for me. When I mention them, they are going to seem completely unrelated, but they are closely tied to one another. The first is this - you meet someone and they claim to be a fan of a particular team, but they can only name one or players in the lineup. Certainly, we would all see through this and discern that they might like the idea of being a fan of the team but hard