The Riverside Gathering Posts

And Abraham stepped forward and said, “Will you really wipe out the innocent with the guilty?” [Genesis 18:23]. For several thousand years or so, scholars, clergy, and laypeople alike have pondered the nature of God. We have wondered if God is strangely anthropomorphic on the one hand, or, as Karl Barth would so eloquently write during the 20th century, “wholly other.” Anthropomorphic evidence can be seen in God’s practice of walking and talking with the man and woman in the Garden [Genesis 2:8]. Other indications include God’s calling out to the first man, after he had eaten the forbidden fruit, “Where are you?” Genesis 2:10]—i.e., wouldn’t God already know? We…

And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, “Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes.”18:7 Abraham ran to the herd, and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. 18:8 Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate [Genesis 18:6-8, NRSV]. Let me repeat for you a story, a story you’ve no doubt already heard. It’s about a couple who lived several thousand years ago. His name was Abraham. Her’s was Sarah.…

This morning, during our weekly Bible Study, as we read Matthew’s account of the Crucifixion [Matthew 27:27-50], I shared a powerful, parable-like offering from C.S. Lewis regarding the level of God’s love. God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing … the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the medial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up. If I may…

And the LORD said to me, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A plumb line.” Then the Lord said, “See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by; the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword” [Amos 7:8-9].1 As the prophet, Amos, records his words sometime between 785-745 BCE, the house of Israel has a significant problem; it has broadly lost its spiritual connection with Yahweh. You see, Israel had been living in what…

For the past 35 years, I have utilized the Revised Common Lectionary as the centerpiece of my weekly devotional life. For the several of you who may not be familiar with “the Lectionary”—in recent weeks, two of you have made direct inquiry to me about it recently—the “RCL” is a three-year cycle of weekly “lections” (i.e., readings) used to varying degrees by the vast majority of mainline Protestant churches in Canada and the United States. The Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, each use a separate, different lectionary. The RCL is built around the seasons of the Church Year, and includes four lections for each Sunday, as well…

After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves …” [Luke 10:1-3]. As I have related in some of these weekly meditations, for the past six years I’ve had the privilege of leading a Bible Study centered in the Carolina Arbors, a “55+” community in southern Durham. While…

When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem [Luke 9:51]. To show you just how far the world has come since the mid-1950s, when I was a young lad growing up with my three brothers in rural southern Gaston County (NC), our family had a special board game, a game that would now be called “quaint,” or possibly even “weird.” It was manufactured and sold by Parker Brothers, the dominant name in board games at the time. The name of the game was—wait for it, wait for it — “Going to Jerusalem.” I’ll bet you thought I was speaking…

The LORD created me at the outset of His way, the very first of His works of old. In remote eons I was shaped, at the start of the first things of earth…. And I was by Him, an intimate, I was His delight day after day, playing before Him at all times. Hebrews 8:22-23, 30 (The Hebrew Bible, tr. by Robert Alter) Selecting appropriate scripture passages for this upcoming Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost—particularly passages from the Old Testament—has long been challenging for the church. For the majority of Christians within the Western Tradition, the first Sunday after Pentecost is designated Trinity Sunday, a day in which we…

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us” [John 14:8, NIV]. Generally, on Pentecost Sunday, one is drawn to the traditional first lesson offered by the Lectionary committee: Acts 2:1-21. After all, a significant portion of the contemporary church marks the Day of Pentecost as the moment of the church’s birth, with its rushing, powerful wind, its tongues of fire, not to mention the wonderfully strange phenomenon of the disciples’ sermons and presentations being uttered in their own native Galilean tongue yet heard and understood by “devout Jews from every nation under heaven” [Acts 2:5] in their own native languages. As important as the…

The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them outside and said, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" They answered, "Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household." [Acts 16:29-31, NRSV]. In The Acts of the Apostles, Luke’s sacred historical and theological account of the early church, we encounter three miracle prison escape stories. In the first, [Acts 5:17-21], the apostles are arrested and locked in the public prison after performing many miracles of healing. Yet, during their first night of confinement, an angel of the Lord opens the prison doors,…