Coming back from a four-month sabbatical to this Gospel passage from Luke for this morning is like trying to run a 5K after not running at all for four months. It was more than a little painful and I discovered that some of my sermon-writing muscles had grown a little...

There he was a man who could not walk surrounded by other people with various impairments, lying by the pool of Bethesda for thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight years. That is a really long time. Every day, he watched others enter the water, water that was believed to have healing power when...

I recently finished reading a book by a sociologist of religion, Rodney Stark, titled The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. In this book, Stark seeks to answer the question: “How did a tiny obscure messianic movement from the edge of the Roman Empire dislodge classical paganism and become...