Based on Matthew 16.13-20 Did you ever play that game as a child, where someone whispers a sentence into your ear, and then you whisper it to the next person, who whispers it to the next person and so on? Until you get to the last person who must say the sentence aloud? By the time you get to that last person, the sentence is often so convoluted, it’s comical. You see, even in just that short time, that message that goes through all the different people sometimes ends up inde

Based on Matthew 15.10-28 Often in the church, we talk about “naming” and “putting a face” on things. Usually these things we need to put a face on is people who we often refer to both in the Bible and in contemporary society as the other. People who we don’t understand or accept -- their ways, their cultures, their beliefs. And so we diminished their very lives. This is what we’re looking at in our reading today in Matthew 15. It was a powerful example in Jesus’s day, but it

Based on 1 Kings 19.9-18 and Matthew 14.22-33 There is a group of volcanic islands in the South Pacific Ocean, so remote that they are even northeast of the Fiji Islands. Wallis, Futuna and Alofi Islands comprise French Polynesia. They were settled primarily by Tongan expansionists about 1,000 years ago. And although territories of France for about 50 years, each island has its own culture, its own traditions and even its own king. The islands themselves are amazing — formed

Based on Matthew 14.13-21 Most of us have heard, read or studied this very popular Bible verse about Jesus Feeding the 5,000 or Jesus Feeding the Multitudes. It’s popular because it not only shows us an amazing miracle of faith— thousands of people gather to hear Jesus’s teaching, and when it gets late and there is no food to be had, Jesus takes all that there is, which is five loaves of bread and two fish, blesses and breaks the bread, and there is enough to feed all of the