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Though I’ve had my share of compliments on my preaching, there was nary a mention at my retirement dinner of any particular sermon. “Being there” counted. “Saying things” . . . not so much; at least, not as much.

Baku is a city of 2.5 million people, halfway around the world from my home in Michigan. What would my knowledge of tree names in the Midwest bring to this global gathering of professional negotiators from 198 countries? What did I know about global politics, or the formalities of United Nations policy making? What’s more, this COP was being called “the finance COP,” another issue that doesn’t often make its way into the woods, and which I therefore know very…

Most days I walk the loop through the cemetery of the First Reformed Church in Pompton Plains, N.J., where my wife Stacey is the Co-Pastor. I read the headstones, which tell a variety of stories. The oldest headstones, dating to the 1700’s when the church was founded, are no longer legible. The beginning of the loop, which is predominately 19th century and replete with many Dutch names, eventually gives way to a more inclusive community. The varied names make me…

On a Damascus Road of sorts, seeing beyond the proof text, I’m able to say to myself and anyone who’ll listen, “Yes, really!” Come cancer, depression, or roulette wheels, we are never alone. Emmanuel. God is with us.

Aging and retirement are distinct concepts, of course, but they frequently intersect. For clarity’s sake, let’s agree that aging is a natural biological process that occurs over time, involving physical, cognitive, and social changes. It’s a universal experience that affects everyone. McCartney and I are both aging, whether we like it or not. And we are both old, according to actuarial tables.

Job hopes that God will long for him and come calling. In short, he hopes that God will remember him. In the life and ministry of Jesus, this is exactly what God does. Christians believe that in the person of Jesus, God remembers our fragile existence in a fragile world. In Jesus, God and the world were reconciled. Call it atonement; call it ransom; call it victory over the forces of evil. By whatever name, God remembers us.

He opened our eyes to what we all knew but had forgotten: that prior to the Reformation, the Catholic Church had devalued the sermon in public worship; the Protestants, in their zeal for the recovery of the scripture, now in their own languages, made the sermon the new focus of public worship, and thereby relegated holy Communion to a secondary place, offering it only once a month, or even, in some cases, just four times a year.

Words are absorbent. Used often enough in partisan slogans or ad campaigns, or by certain religious groups or by "influencers" (itself a word with a troubling history), or spun into new usages by disaffected teens, they can be diverted from their broader purposes. They become contaminated by association or overdetermined by repetition, and so less usable for more neutral efforts to identify or describe. As words are turned into trademarks or code language, they become harder for speakers outside the…

My journey to Palestine and Israel began 20 years ago. A Palestinian Christian, Claudette Habesch, then the Secretary General of Caritas Jerusalem, spoke at a luncheon at our church. She described what life was like for her and other Palestinians who were living under the Israeli occupation—checkpoints, roadblocks, excessive use of military force, imprisonment, land confiscations, home demolitions—and especially its effect on Palestinian children. At the conclusion of her talk, I asked, “What can we do?” “Come and see,” she…

When I think about church ministry, I think about disaffiliation. At council meetings, we attend to the details of disaffiliation. When I gather with other pastors, we give updates on our disaffiliation process. If you’re a regular reader of the Reformed Journal, you’ve read quite a bit about Synodical decisions and disaffiliation over the last few months. None of this is what I originally wanted for myself or for the church, so I also get angry about disaffiliation and about…