A couple of summers ago, Carol and I, along with our kids and grandkids, spent a lovely week in the mountains of Colorado thanks to some dear friends who offered the use of their place.

I’m teaching a pop-up Sunday morning class this summer, mostly for the folks whose regularly scheduled classes don’t meet again until back-to-school time. We call it Food 4 Thought, in part because there are bakery treats each week, and because we ask four questions of the Bible passage from worship that day.

With the college basketball season officially over, I was thinking back to a renewed rivalry this past season that in the end didn’t get much traction: the MU/KU game last fall. That rivalry is in some ways like many others: North Carolina/Duke or Louisville/Kentucky.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about mortality, how everything dies. Frankly, I don’t care for it, even if it is part of the liturgy on Ash Wednesday: “From dust you came and to dust you shall return.” If I’m being completely honest, I despise mortality!

Here’s a fun question: What’s the difference between a Chiefs game and a worship service in church? The list would be long, no doubt. But according to author Barbara Ehrenreich, the two have more in common than we might imagine, or they once did.

Did you see the press release from BBC News about the 2025 “word of the year” according to the Cambridge Dictionary? The word is parasocial, defined as a “relationship felt by someone between themselves and a famous person they do not know.”

The theologian Paul Tillich once quipped that the whole earth is God’s monastery. In other words, even at the movies a person can have a religious experience.

Weekly staff meetings here at the church always begin with a time called Enrichment. Everyone takes turns leading, so each time we are enriched in different ways. It could be a selection of music by one person, a PowerPoint on some aspect of church life by another, and so on.

Seminary, like medical school and law school, equips students with a new vocabulary, most of the terms from Latin or Greek—hysterectomy, myocardia, amicus, modus operandi.

Many of you already know that we began a brief sermon series last Sunday, one we’re calling “Three Sermons, One Text.” For three weeks in a row, the scripture passage comes from Luke 10:25-37, the well-known parable about a man jumped by thieves while traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho.

There’s an old riddle about the math of Lent, which you may recall measures forty days in length, corresponding to Jesus’ forty days of testing in the wilderness.

In his spiritual memoir, British journalist Philip Toynbee wrote, “The basic command of religion is not ‘do this!’ or ‘do not do that!’ but simply look!” That may seem overly simplistic when one considers all the things the Bible commands us to do, but I think he makes a good point.