We're facing hard economic times.  Is there any biblical help available for us?  Job and Jesus are two possibilities. 

Job was touted as the richest of all the people in his time, with seven thousand sheep and three thousand camels.  He loses it all, even though the biblical text tells us he’s a blameless and upright man. 

Christ's resurrection wasn't a major public event with multitudes singing "Alleluia."  In fact it was very intimate and personal, as reported in the gospels.   And the biblical record is not as much of a flesh and blood resuscitation of a dead body as of dreamlike appearances to a few, sometimes in the guise of other people.

During Lent, when many of us Christians do some fasting or change our food habits, I’m reminded of the phrase repeated more than once in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes:  “Eat, drink, and be merry.”   I won't take the author's advice for a couple more weeks, but this is not a frivolous message.

In my Presbyterian Sunday school, there was one Bible passage that all children had to memorize and never forget:  "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16).   We were told that the whole Bible was summed up in that verse: 

Is there a new threat to church-state separation in America?  President George W. Bush launched a faith-based initiative at the beginning of his first term in 2001 to provide federal funds to churches and other religious organizations to address social problems (1).  President Barack Obama has declared that he will expand the federal faith-based initiative.

I’ve always thought of the third person of the Christian Trinity, the Holy Spirit, as female.  The Holy Spirit seems like life-giving energy to me – creative and generative.  There are places in the Bible where God as Spirit has been specifically imaged as a mother, with resonances of birthing and nurturing.

Who speaks in the name of God? By what authority? How can we know? In January we went through a presidential inauguration with a number of people presuming to speak in the name of God in invocations, benedictions and prayers. In the process, they used many of the phrases we would expect from true prophets.

The Rev. Dr. Martin King, Jr. said in his famous Drum Major sermon, preached in 1968 at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta where he was co-pastor with his father, “Yes Jesus, I want to be on your right side or your left side…in love and in justice and in truth and in commitment to others, so that we can make of this old world a new world” (1). 

In the same passage in the Bible, Jesus makes statements that have been used as proof texts for both conservative and liberal Christianity.  He says,  “In My Father’s house are many mansions:  if it were not so, I would have told you” (1). Three verses later he states, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me” (2).