By Richard L. Floyd on 3/10/2010 9:52 AM

We all come before God with empty hands, with nothing to show but our sins, and still God the heavenly Father, like the earthly father in the parable, has been waiting and watching for us all along. Is such love fair? Read More »

By Richard L. Floyd on 3/6/2010 9:12 AM

The Psalm appointed for this Sunday (tomorrow, actually) is Psalm 55, one of my (many) favorites. For those of us who have earned our bread as theologians and ministers of the church, and who sometimes assume an unhealthy knowledge and familiarity with the ways of God, there is a word here we need to hear again and again: Read More »

By Richard L. Floyd on 3/1/2010 2:22 PM

Too many of our new pastors in the mainline church leave the ministry after a few years. There are many reasons why this happens, but for whatever reason, it is not good. Read More »

By Richard L. Floyd on 2/14/2010 9:21 AM

The great British theologian P.T. Forsyth often complained that the church was guilty of the “sin of bustle,” by running errands for the culture at the expense of its own unique vocation. Perhaps preachers are the guiltiest of them all when it comes to this, as they stop attending to their high calling of preaching. Here's Richard Lischer's cogent take on what too often happens to preaching today: Read More »

By Richard L. Floyd on 2/13/2010 10:23 AM

You Won't Despise a Broken Heart Read More »

By Richard L. Floyd on 1/5/2010 1:21 PM

A hymn for epiphany Read More »

By Richard L. Floyd on 12/22/2009 3:30 PM

“The Miracle of Christmas” Read More »

By Richard L. Floyd on 11/30/2009 1:40 PM

I wrote this Advent hymn for my local church in the Advent following the 9/11 attacks. Read More »

By Richard L. Floyd on 10/21/2009 10:44 AM

In the several months since I started my personal blog, “Retired Pastor Ruminates,” which can be found at: http://richardlfloyd.blogspot.com/ I have had quite a number of visits from people doing a Google search for “Retired Pastor.” Many of them are looking for things to say at a retirement for their pastor, a farewell sermon or a prayer. Instead they have found things like long treatises on eschatology, rants about the Red Sox, and borscht recipes.

Never being one to want to disappoint I decided to write a prayer for a retired pastor. I may be retired, but I can still write a prayer. So here it is. I started out writing a rather generic one with (name) and (his/her), but it came out eerily disembodied. So I fell back on an ancient practice, and called my retiring pastor Theophilus, the addressee of Luke's Gospel and the Book of Acts, a name that translates from the Greek roughly as “friend of God,” or “beloved of God.” Since I never knew Theophilus I just wrote the kind of things that Read More »

By Richard L. Floyd on 10/12/2009 10:11 PM

For me the big one was the bad bike accident, but it could have been any number of other events. Because I think most of us have had at some point the disconcerting realization that our life is not under our control. As a pastor for thirty years I spent a lot of time with people after they had this realization. Read More »