There are passages of Scripture that comfort us, and there are passages that unsettle us. And sometimes, if we are willing to stay with them long enough, the unsettling passages may have more to teach us. Today’s Gospel is one of those passages. It begins with Jesus speaking about purity. The religious controversy of the […]

Abraham is the father of three great religious traditions. We know him as the faithful man who, at the age of 75, answered God’s call to leave his native land and to journey with his wife to a place he had never seen. We know him as the man who became a father long after […]

My preaching professor in seminary told my class that when we prepare to preach, we should look for the Good News in the passage we are preaching from. Well, some weeks are easier than others.  When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out […]

The Gospel of John is full of symbolic imagery, the contrast between darkness and light being perhaps the most prominent image of all. Jesus is the light. Those who follow him live in the light. Those opposed to him live in darkness. We saw this in our Gospel reading from last week about Nicodemus who […]