Guest blogger Dr. Matthew E. Henry (MEH) uses poetry to ask why we’re so comfortable skipping over Jesus’ explanation that suffering is a part of God’s plan?

At the heart of theologies that liberate is the belief that there is nothing inherently good about suffering. Suffering is not redemptive, salvation is. So we must eschew shitty soteriologies that place suffering at the center of Christ’s work.

What if we’ve been reading the beginning of this story wrong? What if it was the man questioning Jesus, not the demons?

Sometimes a story about a spear through the genitals is not about sex…

It’s now time to address that scythe wielding, six winged, cherub whose coming heralds fear in the heart of humanity [read that reference again] . . .

This Easter remember, “the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.” Wait, WTF?!

"Peter didn't know what the Hell he was talking about. He had no idea what the mountain-top experience really represented...Moses & Elijah represented encouragement and a reminder to be attentive to faithfulness, because dark days are coming..."

Beyond the fact that the magi never met the baby Jesus, the true gift of the magi is the epiphany, the revelation, Christ wants us to apprehend: that to be seen standing (or kneeling) for something often means we will suffer.

On Sukkot and guest rooms: Why rethinking the "traditional" mis-tellings of the Nativity is so important. 

 . . . one year we’ll defend our belief in an incarnation timed for Sukkoth as there is no way Jesus was born in December, and we’ll write the Card Talk about how the wise men did not show up until He was three years old. Eventually we’ll even address the fact that the little drummer boy was actually a drunk Roman solider looking for his estranged wife (okay, we just made that last one up) . . .