Clap your hands, all you peoples; shout to God with loud songs of joy. Psalm 47:1 (NRSV) Joy and the Weight of the World Today, I don’t feel joyful. It seems the weight of the world is smothering me. Not only does the news distress me, but so does my reading material. This time, it’s Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, a book about his career as a defense attorney for disenfranchised and economically-disadvantaged death row prisoners. He tells the stories of young men whose trials were a sham, with invented evidence and juries purposely selected to be unfriendly toward them. Throughout our country, a fearful and angry white population has…
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Love, False Prophets, and Truth
Beware False Prophets In this week’s scripture reading, John 10:1-10, [1] Jesus warns us to beware the false prophet and heed only the true one. But how can we tell the false from the true? To answer this question, M. Russell Ballard, in a lecture given at the 1999 Latter Day Saints Conference, quotes Joseph Smith, founder of his faith, as saying, “We can accept nothing as authoritative but that which comes directly through the appointed channel, the constituted organizations of the Priesthood, which is the channel that God has appointed . . .” Anyone else, though he may claim to have received revelation from God, is an impostor. [2]…
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Filling that God-Shaped Hole
Sometimes, in quiet moments, when my body is still and I am not distracted by busyness or plans, I notice a tension in my gut, a soft anxiety. Years ago, I would sometimes experience anxiety like a jack-hammer in my solar plexus, a fear that spread to my hands and made it hard to breathe. Fortunately, I no longer get that intolerable dread, but I am not a stranger to a little anxiety here and there. Especially when I meditate, I can get this squirmy feeling, like everything inside me itches, and I want to jump up and get busy doing something, anything, even cleaning the refrigerator. Yet if I…
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On Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day, God, Love, and Superstition Given that this is the month of Valentine’s Day, we on the Worship Team decided to make love our theme this month. So love is what I’ll talk about in this column and at our upcoming worship service, but as I was trying to decide what I might say in this column about this vast topic, I happened to read the beginning of The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan. The book is a collection of lectures about searching for God and Truth through the scientific method. He liked the quote by William James about superstition, which was that superstition was believing in…
