John T. Ball

The Cover of Darkness
by Quantisha Mason-Doll 
John 3:1-17

Under the cover of darkness he comes. With bated breath he searches for any light or movement. Nicodemus waits — he waits for Jesus. Why does Nicodemus wait until the cover of the darkness to seek Jesus? In the gospel of John Jesus rarely does his work at night. (Talk about healthy work/life balance, am I right?) This week we will seek to uncover why Nicodemus, a Pharisee, is hesitant to embrace the community Jesus is gathering....More to come...

In preaching about a certain passage once, I freely made reference to the Trinity. A church member, who rather prided himself on being contrarian, said to me afterward, “You know that the Trinity did not exist until the fourth century.”

Indeed, God did not send the son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him. (v. 17)

Who or what determines who goes to heaven and who goes the other direction?

C.S. Lewis, in his book, The Great Divorce, suggests that it is really up to us.

Object: An empty trash bag. I use a large, black plastic bag that everyone can easily see. You will also want three photographs to use. I used 8x11-sized copies of photos of three unknown people.

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In this story, Mary Louise's dolls come to life on Mid-Summer's Eve, because Mary Louise herself gives them a kiss. She discovers something of herself in each of her dolls, but only one doll acts in exactly the way Mary Louise would have wished. The allegories to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are hopefully obvious!

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Mary Louise was a little bit lonely. Not completely lonely, but just a little bit. With no brothers or sisters, Mary Louise spent quite a lot of time playing by herself. Although not completely by herself, for

Theme For The Day
God's holiness awes, cleanses, inspires, and sends forth.

Old Testament Lesson
Isaiah 6:1-8
The Call Of Isaiah

Think of all the faces we show the world every day. We scrub up every morning and put our game face on. We never show our real face except to those who know us best, the ones who see through the game face to the real you and me. But with everyone else we change our faces.

In the "Science & Technology," section of a recent issue of Business Week magazine, there was an article about the latest on A - I - D - S, the complicated disease we've come to know simply as AIDS. It says the scientists are learning a lot. One of the things they're learning is how the disease kills. And like just about everything that matters, it isn't simple. Says Business Week, "... HIV doesn't mysteriously lie dormant in the body only to emerge years later, as once thought.