The Light Shines in the Darkness

by Lowell Chilton


In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The Word was with God in the beginning. Everything came into being through the Word and without the Word not one thing came into being. What came into being through the Word was life, and the life was the light for all people.

The Light was in the world, and the world came into being through the light, but the world did not recognize the light.

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Can we risk for God?

by Lowell Chilton


Sometimes we are all a bit like Barak. Sometimes we are like the servant who received the single talent. Sometimes we want to be safe and bunker down and not take risks.

The problem is that when we bunker down, we miss out on the bigger picture. When we try to hold onto the way things were, we get in the way of letting things become the way they could be. We get in the way of the gospel.

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Perhaps we're all a little bit Satan

by Lowell Chilton


Perhaps we’re all a little bit of the devil.

In our Gospel lesson today, Peter is doing one of the things he does best and not getting it. This time it is a little surprising because he had just seemed to get it when he declared Jesus the Christ and the Son of the living God.

Now however, Peter objects to the very idea of Jesus needing to die.

“Get behind me Satan! You are a stone that could make me stumble, for you are not thinking God’s thoughts but human thoughts!”

This is Peter, the rock on whom Jesus’s church is to be built, and he is called Satan!

If Peter is Satan, thinking human thoughts and not godly thoughts, then perhaps we’re all a bit of Satan.

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The Gate to an Uncommon Life

by Lowell Chilton


Is Jesus really saying that only Christians get into heaven?

If we are to believe the megaphone on the street, then that is exactly what this text is saying. It is saying that our Hindu sisters and brothers will burn in eternal damnation. It is saying that our Jewish brothers and sisters don’t get to meet St. Peter. It is saying that our blood sacrifice has been paid, but only ours, not my grandfather’s because he was never baptized. It is saying that the murderer who makes a deathbed conversion and confession is saved but that the atheist who dies while serving in the PeaceCorps isn’t.

Did God come into the world and die at the hand of the world for just some of Creation?

Is that really the promise of the resurrection?

Is God’s grace really that limited?

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