As we approach Palm Sunday and Holy Week, Pastor Jeffrey focuses on what may be the central theme of Lent: Letting go of the old to reach for something new. Jesus’s metaphor of a grain of wheat (John 12:24) was a foretelling of his death and the birth of His Church, but it also applies…

With three weeks till Easter, Pastor Jeffrey explores the late-night visit of Nicodemus to Jesus. As so often happens late at night,  profound questions were addressed: What to make of a prophet unlike all the others and of a vision of a forgiving God that is wildly different from the stern and vengeful Deity of…

Pastor Jeffrey explores the familiar story of Jesus attacking the money-changers in the Temple. However, he cites the version from John, which places it much earlier in Jesus’ ministry than the other three . . . a moment of “Righteous Anger” that defined much of his ministry. Jeffrey suggests that this same righteous anger .…

This week Pastor Jeffrey unpacks the great turning point in Jesus’s ministry, when the disciples first dare to voice the idea that he is the prophesied Messiah, and Jesus reveals the cost this will entail. In our own lives we sometimes face such a choice: the chance to do something important that requires a seeming…

For the first Sunday of Lent, Pastor Jeffrey unpacks the story of Satan’s tempting of Jesus in the wilderness. He notes that we all have contemporary “wilderness” experiences, especially in this time of Covid. Jeffrey discusses practical ways to fend off those temptations and stick to the path we know, in our hearts, is the…

On this, Transfiguration Sunday, Pastor Jeffrey explores the nature of the “Mountaintop” experiences that happen a few times in most people’s lives.. He notes that, although these moments stay with us for life, they are not an end in themselves. They are a point of departure, and what truly matters is what we DO with…

In pop culture, prayer is most often depicted as what you do when you’re in deep trouble and nothing else you’ve tried is working. (That’s why we call a desperate long pass in football a “Hail Mary.” ) However, today’s scripture reading is about Jesus making the time to pray when his ministry was on…

Pastor Jeffrey examines a critical episode from the church’s founding: the encounter between Peter and the Roman centurion Cornelius. This was when God made clear to Peter that all people are equally welcome in His church . .. a message that the church has, sadly, spent much of the last 2000 years trying to ignore.

Pastor Jeffrey reviews Mark’s familiar story of the start of Jesus’ ministry to ask what a call like that to the fishermen could look like in today’s world. Even today, some people do drop everything and change their life dramatically, but an invisible, internal change – – a decision to be more intentional about what…

On the eve of the day celebrating the life of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Pastor Jeffrey examines the nature of callings – – from the grand, like Dr. King’s, that change history, to the intimate, which may elevate only our own life. As a special treat, we visit New York’s historic Abyssinian Baptist Church…