Lent 1 | Gen 9:8-17 I’d like tell you to story about couple who were in a difficult marriage. They had only been married a year when the fighting started. By the end of the second year their fighting escalated, until one night Dan lost his temper and pushed Becky down the stairs. Then he rushed her to the hospital. When she was discharged, she had a cast on one leg and had to move about on crutches. She was on crutches for more than a month. As you might expect, during that t

Epiphany 5 | 1 Cor 9:16-23; Mk 1:29-39 George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, was out preaching one day, when some people decided to test him. In a set-up worthy of the Pharisees confronting Jesus, they handed him a tobacco pipe and dared him to smoke it. “If, as you say, Christians are really free from man-made rules and societal expectations, then smoke this pipe.” Now this put Fox in an almost impossible position. He did, indeed, preach the freedom of the Christian from a