Although they are less well-known or widely-practiced than the Advent wreaths, nativity scenes, and pageants around Christmas, or the disciplines and ashes of Lent, there are some really beautiful practices to explore in the season of Epiphany for individuals, families, and churches. In today's episode of Crazy Faith Talk, pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve introduce us to some of them and how they can deepen our faith in this time of the year. From a blessing on our homes done in chalk to a spectu...
Jan 18, 2022•35 min
In the earliest centuries of the Christian church, the first celebrations of Jesus' coming were less focused on the manger scene and more on Christ being revealed to all the world, from the visit of the Magi to all the nations of the world. Maybe our ancestors in the faith were onto something: maybe we need to recover a sense of wonder and appreciation that God not only comes to us in Jesus, but that God also chooses to be revealed in Jesus--to show us something of God's own heart, God's charact...
Jan 11, 2022•25 min
If it's OK for Jesus to grow into being himself--maturing, learning, asking questions and figuring out his identity--then it's OK to grow into our own skin, too. Sometimes church folk forget that, and we assume that a fully-grown, all-wise adult Jesus beamed down from heaven, a la Star Trek, without having come through the learning and growth of childhood and adolescence. But as Luke the Gospel writer tells us, Jesus' own full humanity meant growing up--not just in size or stature, but in his un...
Jan 04, 2022•30 min
Lots of people know the Christmas story, which finds Jesus as a newborn infant laid in a borrowed manger. Plenty of people know stories about the adult Jesus healing, teaching, turning over tables, or headed toward the cross. Not as well-known, though, are the handful of stories we have in the Gospels about child Jesus, so that's where we're headed in this new Christmastide series of Crazy Faith Talk. Join Sarah, Erica, and Steve around the table this week for a look at the visitation of the Mag...
Dec 28, 2021•30 min
After all the talk in this series about how Advent has its own feel that is separate from Christmas--with Advent having its own unique tension, longing for the future, deliberately slow pace, and often somber songs--it's time at last for pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve to talk about how we prepare for Christmas, too. As individuals, in families, as pastors in congregations, and within a wider culture, each of our conversation partners holds the tension of Advent and Christmas differently, and we...
Dec 21, 2021•38 min
There are radio stations and internet streamig services exclusively dedicated to "Christmas music," both sacred and secular, offering non-stop holly, jolly melodies... and then there is the curious phenomenon of the church's catalog of Advent songs. Spanning centuries and styles, the songs of Advent are often tinged with lament, with waiting, with expectation, and with a vulnerability as we hope for a future we cannot yet see. In today's episode of Crazy Faith Talk, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Ste...
Dec 14, 2021•29 min
In a sense, all of Christian life is lived in the tension of the "already" and the "not yet"--between the coming of Christ two millennia ago, and the promise of Christ's coming in glory and the hope of new creation. Advent is just one of those seasons that names this tension out loud, and steers into it, rather than pretending it isn't there. So in this latest episode of Crazy Faith Talk, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve explore the way Advent leads us to think differently about time, and how we ...
Dec 07, 2021•33 min
In a new season and a new series, pastors Sarah, Erica and Steve explore the season many churches have begun observing this past Sunday, the season of Advent that prepares us for Christmas. But in a culture that is already rushing head-long into Christmas sales, music, and decoration, having a season focused on waiting and taking the time to prepare can seem strange. And in a culture that already looks at church folks like we're crazy in other ways, why would we add another layer of mystery and ...
Nov 30, 2021•35 min
On this 250th episode of Crazy Faith talk, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve close their series on essentials of Christianity by looking at the beauty--and messiness--of actually living the Christian faith in community with others. We aren't all like-minded or from the same background, and others have rough edges that grate on us, just as we have rough edges that grate on others. And yet, we need one another, especially in a culture that so easily treats everything as a consumer product to be boug...
Nov 23, 2021•29 min
Being a Christian can never quite be reduced to only head-knowledge or facts to be memorized. It always carries with it some sense of the Mystery of who God is, and how the infinite, intangible God who is beyond physical form or limitations chooses to communicate with us through physical means. That is to say, Christians don't merely memorize or think their way into knowing God, or even feel their way into a relationship with God--there are these physical, touchable momets where the divine shows...
Nov 16, 2021•40 min
The message "Jesus saves" is all over the place, from bumper stickers to billoards, to neon sign at store-front churches. It's even there in Jesus' name, which means "God saves." Countless people have been told by televangelists and celebrity preachers to "accept Jesus as your Savior," too--but what do we think that means? What does it mean to say someone is "saved"--and is it a past tense event, a present moment in our lives now, or a future reality? Or somehow all three? Do I have to be able t...
Nov 09, 2021•30 min
From its earliest roots, Christians have claimed that in Jesus we are given the fullness of God and genuine humanity all at once. And while that certainly says something important about the nature of Jesus, it also says something pretty powerful about the nature of God: that God is capable of being expressed through the fragility, vulnerability, and earthiness of humanity. And it says something, too, about God that God chooses to identify with the nobodies of the imperial backwater in the experi...
Nov 02, 2021•28 min
We're used to thinking of "the Bible" as a single book, written all at once, since we carry personal copies within a single cover. But it's really more of an anthology, spanning cultures, times, authors, and genres, which means that carrying a Bible is rather like walking around with a library that took a long time to put together. In their ongoing series, "Christianity 101," pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve look at the story behind how we got the Bible, as well as how the Bible is different than...
Oct 26, 2021•44 min
Is God important? Absolutely! Is faith important in relating to this God? Again, probably just about every professing Christian would agree there, too. But then the moment we start saying anything about who this God is, or what God is like, we're into the territory of faith-statements or creeds. And there, curiously enough, different Christians head in different directions. Some recite ancient creeds of the church every week in worship. Others keep them printed in a book or the back of a hymnal ...
Oct 19, 2021•31 min
In this new series about the Big Ideas and Central Questions of Christian faith, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve gather around the conversation table to look at what we mean by "faith." Everybody seems to agree that "faith" is a good thing, and that it is important, but what exactly are we talking about? Are "faith" and "fear" opposites, as sometimes gets said by some in the COVID era, making it sound like taking precautions for your neighbors is somehow opposed to believing in God? Are "faith" ...
Oct 12, 2021•35 min
Whether you have been a part of congregational life since you were in diapers or have been wrestling from the margins of community about whether you even believe in God any god, or many gods, much less the specific faith called Christianity, we invite you to a new series meant to explore some of the Big Questions and Central Ideas of faith. For folks who would call themselves life-long Christians, people who would identity as "spiritual but not religious," and for people who are just not sure wh...
Oct 05, 2021•38 min
Conventional wisdom is easy: it's good to be strong, it's bad to be weak, and if you are being a good and faithful religious person, God will give you the things you pray for. Right? That sure is popular theology--and it sells books and draws listeners. The only trouble is, it's just not the way things work for the God we know in Jesus. As a case in point, we'll look at the curious case of Saint Paul's "thorn in the flesh," some unpleasant situation in the apostle's life that he attributes both ...
Sep 28, 2021•29 min
In their latest conversation exploring some of the Bible's stranger tales, pastors Erica and Steve take a look a curious episode from the end of the book of Acts. While their fellow conversation partner Sarah can't be here for this episode, they look at a tale from Acts 28 when the apostle Paul survives a prison shipwreck, only to be bitten by a snake--and then how this moment slides into an extended opportunity to help other people where life takes them. In a time when pop religion often teache...
Sep 21, 2021•27 min
Preachers often worry or joke about their sermons putting people to sleep, but it actually happened once, and to no less than the apostle Paul! In a strange little episode from the book of Acts, we hear about a man named Eutychus, who falls asleep during a long sermon and falls out of a third-story window to his death--only to be raised to life again! What are we to make of a story like this, and what does it say about the urgency and priority the early church had on gathering and teaching one a...
Sep 14, 2021•29 min
We often assume that being a Christian means always following the rules and living a quiet, respectable life, out of trouble and without drawing bad attention to ourselves. And... sometimes that's true. But sometimes the followers of Jesus knowingly go into situations they know will be provocative or will end with jail, punishments, or even the specter of death. And yet, in several different stories from the book of Acts, early Christian witnesses like Peter, Paul, and Silas, found themselves in...
Sep 07, 2021•36 min
If you spend much time at all reading the stories of Jesus, you come to expect that he's always helping, always healing, and always doing something creative rather than destructive. That's why it is so jarring to see a story in the Gospels where Jesus comes across a fig tree without any fruit on it and curses it so that it withers overnight--and it's even more unsettling when you find out that it wasn't even the season for figs! What are we to make of a story like this, and how does it fit along...
Aug 31, 2021•42 min
Do Christians believe in angels? Sure. Demons and other unclean spirits? They show up in the New Testament for sure. But what about the spirits of the dead--especially good and faithful people like the prophet Samuel? We don't really know what to think about a strange story like the one where King Saul consults a medium (sometimes called a "witch" in some renderings) who conjures up the spirit of the deceased prophet who had been a thorn in Saul's side for all of his reign. What are we supposed ...
Aug 24, 2021•22 min
In a new series, pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve gather around the imaginary table to explore some strange stories from the Bible--what they mean, where they come from, why they might have been remembered, and what they say to us today. Kicking off the series is a look at the story of Jacob wrestling with...someone... during the night at a key moment in his life, before being punched in the hip and given a new name. It's a story that tells us about how we wrestle with our own questions, doubts, ...
Aug 17, 2021•30 min
In this final episode of their series highlighting children's resources, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve look at two children's books that speak beautifully to God's love for the world and our ways of thinking and speaking about God, too. And while we may often think about picture books as either only for preschoolers at bedtime or children's moment times in church services, we'll discover again how much a simple story with clear words can convey profound ideas more directly and invite connectio...
Aug 10, 2021•24 min
In their ongoing series looking at media for children and young people, pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve take a look at two offerings shared by Pastor Sarah: first, a book called Tear Soup, meant to explore grief and loss for young people, and then the Buck Denver series, created by Phil Vischer (also of Veggie Tales fame), which explores questions of faith and the Bible in an engaging and open way. We invite you to our virtual table here for conversation and some great resources to share with th...
Aug 03, 2021•20 min
In the first episode of a brand-new series, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve start to explore and highlight different media they find useful for exploring faith with children and youth, whether resources for Christian education in churches, children's books for at home, or videos and authors that they find helpful for deepening their own faith. As we start the series, we're introduced to the child-friendly but also surprisingly deep writings (and drawings) of Daniel Erlander, whose insights might...
Jul 27, 2021•26 min
In this final episode of their series highlighting voices of faith from outside their individual particular faith traditions, pastors Sarah, Erica, and Steve look at the contemporary voice of the late Rachel Held Evans, who made a profound impact on many millennial and Gen-Z Christians even though she only had the chance to write a few books before a reaction to medication took her life. As a former journalist who grew up in the town famous for the Scopes Monkey Trial, Rachel Held Evans brought ...
Jul 20, 2021•31 min
The trouble with a word as big and broad as "love" is that we can all say we're in favor of it and still mean very different--even contradictory--things when we say it. The church is no different. We know we're supposed to be a community grounded in "love" for God and neighbor, but all too often, the church has gotten swept up in the wider culture's assumptions that "love" is primarily about romantic pairings in fairy-tale stories, or a purely emotional reality, or about enforcing a certain set ...
Jul 13, 2021•29 min
As they continue their current series listening to voices outside each of their own faith traditions, pastors Erica, Sarah, and Steve turn to a much-loved spiritual teacher in the Roman Catholic tradition from the twentieth century, Henri Nouwen. Well known for titles such as The Wounded Healer, The Return of The Prodigal Son, Life of the Beloved, and numerous other works, Nouwen wrote extensively about life in community, spirituality and contemplation, and knowing God first as foremost as One w...
Jul 06, 2021•26 min
Sometimes religious folks assume it's a new idea to say that Christians should advocate for sharing their resources and pursuing policies to help those most in need. Sometimes you'll hear critics saying that's a recent invention called "the social gospel" but that "true" Christianity encourages people to get rich (or is at least silent about the goodness or badness of wealth, and indifferent about whether you have to share). Sometimes you'll hear folks laud ancient church leaders for their doctr...
Jun 29, 2021•37 min
