The Roofless Church

Category: Father Forgive them

  • Dear Catalytic Convertor Thieves

    Dear Catalytic Convertor Thieves

    I know that some people will either think I am either full of BS, naive, or just stupid. But, I submit to you–especially if you are on a spiritual path–to be a Catalytic Convertor when offered the opportunity. Take the junk that comes in and transmute it. (Like the Hawaiian concept of Hemolele) We are…

  • Haunted By Forgiveness

    Haunted By Forgiveness

    For the entire week before George Floyd was murdered, I meditated on the teachings of forgiveness in light of Jesus’ execution in preparation for a sermon on forgiveness. In order to get myself into the mindset, I imagined myself forgiving a police officer who was killing me and I watched an hour and a half…

  • Do I Deserve To Be Happy?

    Do I Deserve To Be Happy?

    Recently a friend told me that I deserve to be happy? Hearing those words took me back to one of the darkest times in my life–a season I touch on in the links on my last post, DMX and the Ballad of the Brokenhearted. Prior to the emotional crash I chronicle in that and other…

  • That Old Rugged Cross

    That Old Rugged Cross

    A stumbling block. An Offense. A curse.  These are all words used to describe the cross of Jesus that we find ourselves contemplating. The Roman Cross, one of the most inhumane instruments of death ever conceived. Jesus, a teacher of wisdom and love who traveled through communities blessing and loving, healing and holding, cherishing and…

  • Ghosts of Suicide

    Ghosts of Suicide

    I am not one of those people who believes that people ever get over the traumas that happen in their lives. Rather, I believe that we either learn to live with them or we expand to leverage them. In my own life, I can admit that I  have never gotten over anything in the conventional…

  • Doomed to Significance

    What follows is a message I delivered at Second Baptist Church of Boulder on October 30, 2016 for their youth Sunday. The premise of the message is that whatever we do or don’t do has an impact on the world. The message was inspired by the Sermon on the Mount and a conversation I had…

  • If You Don’t Bear Your Cross, Someone Else Will Have To

    On July 17, 2016, I preached a sermon entitled “Broken For You”. The idea behind the sermon came down to the idea that if people took 100% responsibility for their lives the whole world would be transformed in an instant. The spark for the sermon came from Jesus’ teaching that those who desire to follow…

  • The Privilege of Fearing God

    Fear and God.  For a long time those two words seemed not to go together for me. After all, in the book of 1 John we are told “God is Love” and despite how we tend to think of hate as love’s opposite, anyone who has ever loved knows that is inaccurate.  Fear is actually…

  • The Burden of Innocence

    As I mentioned in the video, today I was thinking about the burden of innocence that we all share and how Mary, the mother of Jesus, symbolizes that burden. Sometimes I imagine if some of us hurt folk were able to just pour out our hearts and tell the burdensome story of how we lost…

  • If You Don’t Have My Back, Get Out of My Face

    So I was talking to my surrogate daughter the other day about life.  She was asking about why it is that we often get bothered when we see people doing the very things that we excuse ourselves for.  The conversation reminded me of a talk I had with my good friend, Jensen Yensen, which he…