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 […]

Jesus is walking along when he sees a man named Matthew sitting at the tax booth. That is how the story begins: with a man sitting. Matthew is not sitting in a neutral place. He is sitting at the tax booth, a place where money is taken, where empire reaches into ordinary households, where the […]