A friend of mine is on a bicycle trip. Not just any bicycle trip. No, she is on a solo, around the world bicycle trip. At this very moment she is somewhere in Iran cycling her way to the Afghanistan border. A few months ago, she gave up her apartment, left her job, sold most of her things and left with her bike on her trip. If all goes well, and you can just imagine all the things that could go wrong, she should be back in about a year. The kingdom of God is like a young woman who has a dream of cycling around the world. She gives up her home, quits her job, sells everything she has, gets on her bike and goes. Jesus came to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God, or as it’s put i
There’s a lot of theology in Paul’s letter to the Romans, which we’ve been reading for the last few weeks. And because there’s a lot of theology in it, a lot of dense logic, difficult concepts, and complicated reasoning, sometimes I think we kind of zone out a bit when we hear it. But I want you to know that underlying all that theology is a story that is deeply personal, and deeply passionate. It’s the story of someone who experienced the depths of despair, the lowest of the lows, and then just when he thought all was lost, was rescued, set free, and brought back to life. It’s Paul’s story and this is his testimony. And sometimes I think we need to hear Paul’s letter to the Romans as t
Well, we don’t get to read that in church very often! The Song of Songs, sometimes called the Song of Solomon, is one of the most surprising books of the Bible. We don’t hear it often, it only shows up a couple of times in our three year cycle of Sunday readings. So I thought we should seize the opportunity and take a closer look at it this morning. The Song of Songs is a love poem. It is a poem in which a man and a woman who are deeply in love call back and forth to one another, something like the way we read it together this morning. “The voice of my beloved!” calls the woman, “Look he comes, leaping over the mountains, bounding over the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young