Michael's Blog

A Sermon preached at Emmaus Road Mennonite Fellowship, Berne, IN, December 28, 2025 The Lion King … Scar. Little Red Riding Hood … the Big, Bad Wolf. Sleeping Beauty … Maleficent. Harry Potter … Voldemort. Dorothy … the Wicked Witch of the West, but in Wicked, it’s the Wizard. Mary and Joseph … Herod. Every parent struggles with balancing the innocence of their children with things that are unfair, dark, and scary in their lives. I used to read, “There’s

     This week the Indiana Center for Middle East Peace hosted four Tibetan Buddhist monks from the Tashi Kyil Monastery, exiled to Dehra Dun, India, from Tibet. This is the fourth time ICMEP has hosted the monks in the last 17 years in partnership with the Tibetan Mongolian Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center in Bloomington, IN.  They created a World Peace Sand Mandala at the Allen County Public Library downtown, gave talks at the Insight Meditation Group in Fort Wayne

764 days – that’s 25 months and 2 days. And this is what we’re up against: + This week it was reported that YouTube has rolled over for the President, quietly erasing more than 700 videos from three Palestinian justice organizations documenting Israeli human rights violations; + The latest issue of The Nation describes how the Israel Lobby targeted our guest, Cori Bush, and her colleague, Jamaal Bowman from New York in the last election – over $8million spent against Bush,

ICMEP is a non-sectarian organization. This is a sermon Michael preached about the trip he recently led to South Africa (Emmaus Road Mennonite Fellowship, Berne, IN, October 19, 2025). It is intended for a Christian congregation, but hopefully, all people of good will find some inspiration in it. Reading: 2 Timothy 4.1-5      In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom,

A VOICE CRIES OUT IN THE WILDERNESS: Meeting the great Gideon Levy One of the great privileges of my last trip to Palestine was getting to meet Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist who lives in Tel Aviv, and probably the most high profile Israeli journalist who is willing to tell the truth about Israel and Palestine. Our group met with him for about an hour, as we passed through Tel Aviv on our way to the Galilee region. Gideon

     Anita Rediger is part of the Pastoral Team at Emmaus Road Mennonite Fellowship, Berne, IN. She has been a member of MennoPIN, and is active in promoting the Palestine struggle for full civil, political, and human rights.  Zoughbi Zoughbi and Bethlehem’s Wi’am Conflict Resolution & Transformation Center are partners with Emmaus Road Mennonite Fellowship. In a recent conversation, Anita made this comparison:      On August 27, Robin Westman carried out a heinous shooting attack on children at Annunciation