What does “prophesy” mean? We tend to use it to mean “predict the future.” But actually that’s not what it means at all. The ancient prophets sometimes got their predictions wrong. Remember the story of Jonah? He predicts “Yet thirty days, and Nineveh will be destroyed.” He gets angry because in the end God doesn’t do what was predicted. Why? Because the people of Nineveh repented of their evil and turned to God, and so God showed them mercy.Read More »Be A Prophet: Pentecost
The Kingdom Come: God’s Beloved Community
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33; 44-52
“But the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.”—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Facing the Challenge of a New Age,” 1956
A story very familiar to long-time St. Stephen members but which may be new to the rest of you is the story of The Hole. You see, the idea of this gothic cathedral has been around since the forties, when the session of old Broadway Presbyterian Church first dreamed of moving here. Plans were drawn up, some of which we have framed on the wall in the church office. The original sanctuary, what’s now the Parish Hall, was built immediately after the church moved to this site in the 1950s.Read More »Faithfulness Builds Hope
Fall and Creation
By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
July 20, 2014
St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX
Romans 8:12-25
“Western Christians have imagined that, at the end of the day, God is going to throw the present space-time universe into a trashcan and we’ll be sitting on clouds playing harps. The ultimate future that we’re promised is much more interesting than that. It’s new heavens and a new Earth with new bodies to live in.”—N. T. Wright
I’m a year out from the 30th anniversary of my ordination in 1985. Don’t worry, I’m not fishing for another party like the one you threw me for my 10th anniversary. Frankly, the 30th anniversary of my ordination only reminds me of how old I am. But I do often have a fantasy. I sometimes wish I could go back to those first early years of my ministry, when I was a solo pastor of a small but wonderful little inner city church in Virginia, and start over again, but with all the knowledge that I’ve garnered from the past twenty-nine years. There were many good things about my years there, but many things that didn’t go so well either because of my personal shortcomings or because I simply didn’t know enough. That church in 1985 would benefit so much from what I know today in 2014 about pastoral care, preaching, worship leadership, community engagement, and social justice.Read More »The Cosmic Do-Over Button
Genesis 25: 19-34
Romans 8: 1-11
Matthew 13: 1-9, 18-23
“Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of what will be.”
Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180)
Carl Jung once said that we spend the first half of our lives building our personal kingdoms, and the second half defending them. You get to my age, and you start to think, I’ve arrived. Everything I’ve got, I think, is the pinnacle. It’s the result of my hard work. I should rest on my laurels. Change becomes viewed as a threat.
The problem is, the Gospel is all about change. Jesus came preaching, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Repent has come today to mean, renounce your sins. But that’s not what it means in Greek. The word in Greek is metanoia, and it means change. Change, because the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. The world is changing, because the world has to change when the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Change, because you and I have to change when the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.
John, Peter, Joanna, and Anna traveled with the hearse to pick up Jesse’s body at Eagle Pass. When they arrived, they had to pass, once again, through reporters and distraught crowds. Jesse’s pale, slightly bluish body was arranged on a metal morgue table, covered by a sheet from the chest down, over which could be seen the “y” incision made by the coroner.Read More »Chapter VIII: The Cowtown Christ Comes Back!
For a couple of days after their arrests for interrupting the broadcast of the National Day of Prayer in Cowboys Stadium, Jesse the Cowtown Christ, and Peter and Mary, her two self-acknowledged accomplices, wore the orange jumpsuits of the Tarrant County Jail on Weatherford. They were represented by a law firm that specialized in federal crime. Jesse had no clue who had hired the law firm until their very expensive bonds were paid and they were released on their own recognizance. As they were leaving the courthouse with their lawyer, they were met by two men Jesse knew: the rich man from her old church job who had tried to pay for her to start a new church, and the political power-broker who’d tried to get her to run for office.Read More »Chapter VI: We Crucify the Cowtown Christ, Part One: To Tell the Truth
This is the Fourth of a sermon series called “The Cowtown Christ” that reimagines the story of Christ from the gospels by setting it in modern day Fort Worth. The Cowtown Christ is Jesse, a Mexican-American young woman with an unusual relationship with God. She preaches that “The City of God,” “la Ciudad de Dios” has come to Fort Worth, just as Jesus in His ministry taught that The Kingdom of God had come to the earth. It’s a message of God’s presence and hope in the real world, but also of concrete responsibility.
The grave of Broadway Presbyterian Church’s first pastor, the Rev. Junius French, in Oakwood Cemetery. Broadway was St. Stephen’s predecessor church before they moved to the TCU area in 1950.
Jesse, the Cowtown Christ, had assembled a diverse group around her, whom she called mis compañeros cercanos, my close companions.
There was Joanna, an Iraq war veteran who was now a Fort Worth Police officer who worked with the homeless; Anna, a Palestinian Muslim doctor, who admired Jesse as a wise female leader; Peter, the former gas company executive and recovering alcoholic whom Jesse had met at the Apple store; Nate, an African-American community organizer from Stop Six; John, the mega-church pastor who hadn’t quite decided what he thought of Jesse, yet; Mary, the teenaged runaway that Jesse had rescued from working at an underage strip club; Glenda, a slighty-off-kilter homeless woman who was diagnosed as paranoid-schizophrenic and was very laid-back about taking her meds; And Jude, a well-known local psychologist with a burgeoning practice.
A couple of years ago, I was invited to serve on a clergy panel of Equality Texas, a group that advocates for LGBTQI2-S rights, at a Texas Freedom Network conference. I was honored to be asked. Despite the fact that there were several break-out groups and panels, I was astonished at the heavy attendance to our clergy panel.
It was a room full of hurt and pain. There were men and women who’d been raised either Roman Catholic or in a fundamentalist faith, and thought of themselves as Christian, but were ostracized because of their sexual orientation.Read More »A Personal Journey, 7: Paul, the LGBT-Rights Convert??!!
The most pernicious and un-Christian way that Christians use Scripture is as a rulebook. This is legalism, and it goes against the very spirit of the teachings of Jesus and of Paul, both of whom were intense critics of any use of Scripture or religious observance as a way of putting barriers between God and human beings.Read More »A Personal Journey, 4: The Blasphemy of Legalism
Our friend Sharon Curry, who went in December to serve as a missionary in the South Sudan, had to be evacuated almost as soon as she arrived because of ethnic violence. She has been frustrated by this, obviously—not only because she has been interrupted in the mission work she intended to do, but even more because she’s been in her placement in Akobo just long enough to get to know people. Now she is in a major city, Malakal, far from the fighting, hearing second-hand how overwhelmed her friend the local doctor is, and how all the families she’d just gotten to know are experiencing deaths and hiding in the forest, afraid to go to the hospital for fear that they’ll be killed by guerilla fighters.Read More »Secret Agenda: Mark 1: 40-45
