I am doomed, I think, never to become a trend-setter, because culturally I never seem to discover the latest trend until it has been around for a while and starts to become Yesterday’s News. Thus I have lately discovered the popularity of Destination Weddings. Googling “Destination Weddings” brings up 12,100,000 results in .20 seconds, the first one of which informs me that I should choose them for my Destination Wedding, because they…

There are three Hebrew words which the first century church used often in their worship, and we have retained only two of them. These Hebrew/ Aramaic words were so important that they were carried bodily and untranslated into the worship of the non-Hebrew Gentile churches, where they functioned not as Hebrew words but as international Christian ones. All Christians today use two of them every time they worship. They are: “amen” and…

I was born and raised in the greater Toronto area (known to the natives there as “the GTA”), and came to faith in the early 70’s. For the students of ancient history among us, that was the time of the so-called “Jesus Movement”, when tens of thousands of young people came to Christ, many of them former hippies and drug-addicts. It was a brief blip on the cultural radar, and was over…

Recently the news has been full of the story of a Roman Catholic monsignor, Krzysztof Charamsa of Poland, the Adjunct Secretary of the Doctrine for the Congregation of the Faith of the Roman Catholic Church. The Reverend Charamsa was a former Vatican official, and he was stripped of his post recently after he publicly acknowledged that he was gay and also in a gay relationship with another man. He has written the Pope…

Our Lord’s parable of Lazarus and the rich man is unique among the parables, for in this parable alone one of the characters has a name. The parable begins, “There was a rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus”.  Compare how the parable of the Prodigal Son begins: “There was a man who…

Part of the Law of Moses forbids moving the boundary marker. It reads, “In the inheritance which you will hold in the land that the Lord your God gives you to possess, you shall not move your neighbour’s boundary marker which men of old have set” (Deuteronomy 19:14). Moving the marker was a serious matter—so serious in fact that it was subject to a terrible curse in the corporate liturgy set out…