Don’t know about you, but I’m tired of women being passed over, especially those who stand up and tell the truth, whether it be at the workplace, in our communities, or at home. And there’s many women in the Bible who have been overlooked—among them, Huldah, the prophet. That’s right. Huldah, the prophet (2 Kings 22:14-20 and 2 Chronicles 2 34:22-33)....
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Cut-out witches are everywhere this time of year. You see them carved into pumpkins, stuck into trees. But deep in the pages of the Hebrew Bible, about the year 1007 BC, is the story of a real witch—a woman who could have been killed for responding to the ragged, scared man at her door. Turns out that man was the...
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Last in the series: “Women and War” Sometimes there are stories in your mind and heart that will not go away—and this is one. The biblical narrative of the woman who ate her son turned the stomachs of our research group when we came upon it, deep in 2 Kings. Here, amidst the horrors of war (8th century BCE), in a terrible bargain,...
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"Jesus died and rose from the dead." While not exactly a ho-hum expression, we often take it for granted. Think then, of the resurrection from another angle: What if no one had been there when Jesus walked out of that tomb? Would he have slogged through the streets of Jerusalem, perhaps winding up at Peter’s house? Would he have made his way to...
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Excerpts from a sermon at St. David's, Minnetonka, Minnesota...
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Why does Martha of Bethany have such a bad reputation? Because she’s so organized? Because she complained to Jesus? (I like that about her; it takes some chops to complain to The Guy.) Here’s the well-known part of her story (Luke 10:38-42): Martha is cooking dinner for Jesus and the disciples. Sister Mary is sitting at Jesus’ feet, listening. Martha needs...
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My goodness. Dreams in scripture are a big deal. They’re all over the place in the Old and New Testaments…twenty-one of them to be exact,* not including various visions…and only one is reported by a woman. The woman is, of course, Pontius Pilate’s wife. Remembered as a saint in the Greek Orthodox Church, she is also seen as a possible secret...
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My mother-in-law always grieved Leonard, her tall and handsome father. She was three when he died; he was twenty-eight. He was a millworker in the woolen mills of Lawrence: young and healthy one week and gone the next. Family history says that he went into Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in 1918, thirty long miles away, and "didn’t come out." Best...
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Many women in the Bible suffer, caught in the midst of unimaginably harsh choices and pain. Think of the woman in Judges 19, whom we'll look at today. Most Christians do not know her story, and are surprised to find it in scripture. We’ve swept the pieces of it—and her—under the collective Judeo-Christian rug for 3000 years now. And she's not the...
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Let’s be real. Everyone knows the story of Abraham, but how about the comparable story of the widow of Zarephath? Both were about sacrifice and beloved sons. Abraham delivered his son Isaac to the funeral pyre—and would have killed the boy, had not God’s angel intervened. The widow of Zarephath also saw her son on death’s doorstop, although—unlike Abraham—such a condition...
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