"And the one who was seated on the throne said, 'See, I am making all things new.'"  Revelation 21:5.

The liturgical calendar tells us that we are in the season of "Ordinary Time."   Back when I was growing up as the son of a United Methodist minister, the church in those days seemed to have an aversion to sounding "too Catholic," so in its calendar it changed the Roman Catholic designation of "Ordinary Time" to counting the Sundays "after Pentecost."   So throughout the summer and fall you would count so many Sundays after Pentecost, break for "Christ the King, Christmas and Epiphany" and then resume counting the after Pentecost Sundays until Lent and Easter. &nbsp

I just returned from a one-day, somewhat "unofficial" meeting at the Interchurch Center on Riverside Drive in NYC that involved a number of different leaders from across our denomination.  It was the second meeting of its kind, the first one taking place last fall.  It is a gathering of people with very different opinions on things who in one way or another were part of what is now referred to in Presbyterian Church (USA) leadership circles as the "Miracle in Minneapolis."   This phrase describes an agreement that was struck regarding a Middle East Report to the General

This past week, I preached a sermon at our three Sunday morning services using the parable of the lost sheep from Luke 15:1-7 as the second text. Then, this week, I was reading a book of religious poetry, and I stumbled upon the following piece, entitled De Sheepfol’, by American author Sarah Pratt McLean Green (1856-1935). The style, of course, is a spiritual, which originated from the African’ -American slave experience. To achieve its fullest meaning, a spiritual is to be both read and heard.