Pastor Tom's Community

“… despise not thy mother when she is old.” -Proverbs 23:22b  Your Mother When She Is Old We need as many “old mothers” as we can get in the church and in our lives. We need to honor the older mothers among us and change our thinking about the word, “old.” For some reason, we…

  This is prayer.   We move in the direction of God.   The movement itself is far more important that the words we use or the sentiments we experience. It is the movement that expresses the true intentions of our hearts.   The movement is the most honest and reliable indicator of our spiritual…

  Shai Halevi on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority - Enlargement of image at Wikimedia-Commons https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/1039-1_for_screen.jpg Close-up of paleo-Hebrew Leviticus scroll, now at the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem Today, I seek from God what I must give to God. It is a presumptuous request and an audacious expectation that I could be what I seek to…

    The church that aspires to being coddled by the world, that whines for preferred status, that complains in the wilderness that it only has manna, and that expects great privilege has, perhaps, not read Peter's first epistle enough or Jesus' admonitions on the mountain in Matthew 5 and following. What is now, is…

There is jesting that makes us jolly and jovial and there is truth that makes us joyful. It cannot be assumed that they are the same.

Luke 6:12-26 (NRSV) Now during those days he went out to the mountain to pray; and he spent the night in prayer to God. And when day came, he called his disciples and chose twelve of them, whom he also named apostles: Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, and James, and John,…

Where is the wide place, the place of latitude, creativity, individual expression, freedom, and joy?

The psalmist either had a short sighted view of God, an over-inflated sense of his and his people's own righteousness, a limited perspective, all of the above, some of the above mixed together, or an insight into how things are in the real world — that both the righteous and the unrighteous suffer.   Some…

The video of this morning’s worship is here. April 18, 2021