“The kingdom of heaven is like…” Again and again, Jesus begins with those words. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. The kingdom of heaven is like yeast hidden in flour. The kingdom of heaven is like treasure buried in a field. The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine […]
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 […]
In today’s Gospel reading, the Sadducees come to Jesus with a trick question. They don’t believe in the resurrection, and they want to make the idea sound ridiculous. So, they pose a scenario drawn from the law of levirate marriage: a woman is married to seven brothers, one after another, each dying childless. “In the […]
Luke is a Gospel full of parables. The parable of the Good Samaritan and the parable of the Prodigal Son are perhaps the two best known of all his parables. And all of the parables in the Gospel of Luke share a common element. No matter the plot, all of the parables have a twist. […]
In a nation and a world that is divided by so much right now I bet we could all agree that this little passage from Luke for this morning is really tough. So tough that most would choose to avoid it, but not the creators of our lectionary. They have made sure that we deal […]
In this week of the Presidential Inauguration, an interesting article from the Smithsonian Institute Magazine popped up in my feed entitled “A brief history of presidential inaugural speeches from George Washington to today” (Claire Jerry, published 1/14/2025). Being the history-minded person that I am I clicked on the link. The article cited the work of […]
Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I […]
Our Gospel passage for today is hard, or at least hard for anyone who has a dime more than they need to provide the basic essentials of life. As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit […]
Last week I spoke about wisdom and that an aspect of having wisdom is the ability to imagine a world that is different from the world in which we currently live and move and have our being. I think a lot of what Jesus preached, taught and did were his attempts to help his followers […]
You hear me frequently refer to the Kingdom of God in my sermons. There is a very good reason for this. The Gospels are all about Jesus revealing the Kingdom of God. He talks about the Kingdom of God all the time and he tells us that all that healing, and exorcising, and sitting down […]