Immediately after feeding a multitude with five loaves and two fish, Jesus makes the disciples get into a boat. “Make” is almost too gentle a word. The Greek verb suggests that Jesus compelled them, constrained them, practically forced them into the boat. This is not a pleasant invitation to take an evening cruise. Jesus puts […]
Today’s Gospel begins with Jesus trying to get away. Matthew tells us that Jesus withdrew by boat to a deserted place. He had just learned that John the Baptist had been murdered by Herod. John—Jesus’ cousin, teacher, baptizer, and fellow prophet—had been executed because he dared to speak truth to power. Jesus must have been […]
“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 […]
There is blood on the ground in Biddeford. On Monday morning, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero left his home to go to work. He was a young Colombian immigrant. A husband. A father. A man working two jobs to care for his family. He had authorization to work in this country and a Social Security number […]
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 […]
“I will not leave you orphaned,” Jesus says. “I am coming to you.” It is one of the tenderest promises in John’s Gospel. And it comes at a moment when tenderness is desperately needed. Jesus is speaking to his friends on the night before he dies. The table has been shared. Feet have been washed. […]
John’s ninth chapter begins with a man sitting by the roadside, a man born blind, and almost immediately the people around him begin talking about him rather than to him. The disciples ask, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” It is a cruel question disguised as a religious […]
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 […]
When I woke up on the morning of November 6, the day after the election, the first action I took was to pick up my phone to see the results, I suspect most of you did the same thing. For some, the results brought joy and a sense of relief, a feeling that the world […]
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 […]