Anabaptist and Quaker essays, sermons, and other writings
A lone tree stands in the middle of a field. Can you picture it? Old, crooked, large branches to offer shade. Green in summer, empty in winter. Its sole purpose is to offer some relief from the sun. Maybe it has seen picnics come and go, lazy cows, or rambunctious […]
When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, […]
I share two poems centering my Palestinian identity and experience. As a Palestinian Christian, I aspire to walk in Jesus’ footsteps in challenging oppression, empire, and occupation. I provide an introduction to Palestine for readers to better understand the context of the poems. I first provide a brief introduction to […]
For the last 8 months, I have been engaging in a daily ritual of prayer and worship with the Iona Community. The Iona Community is an international, ecumenical Christian movement based on the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland. The community was founded in 1938 by Reverend […]
There was a time I spoke about Christian’s attitude towards work to high school students. So, in the introduction, I asked the students to get tools for work and go out to the field to cut the grass. Before I finished giving them instructions on what we were supposed to […]
It is no exaggeration to say that I would not be a Christian today if it was not for Romans 7:15 and 19, in which none other than the Apostle Paul – chosen to be God’s instrument’ chosen to bring the name of Jesus before Gentiles and kings and before the people […]
When any of you has a grievance against another, do you dare to take it to court before the unrighteous, instead of taking it before the saints? 2 Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are […]
Humanity has been living in the tension of God’s already and not yet Kingdom anticipating the end of time. Since time immemorial, the calamities have sometimes been associated with the end time. For instance, the occurrence of war, diseases, floods, and famines are a few. It is recorded, When he […]
Metaphors and figures of speech are not just the tools of poets, but the fabric of our everyday life. In the previous sentence alone I employed two different metaphors to talk about metaphors (i.e. tools and fabric). We use linguistic images all the time, often without realizing it, and we […]
Do you think the twelve disciples ever wondered why Jesus chose them? Perhaps some of them thought they knew. When they were arguing about who was the greatest, for example, can’t we just hear Peter, “Well, you know Jesus chose me because somebody had to be the one to actually […]