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Genesis 25:19-34
Proper 10A
Since the fulfilling of God’s covenant with Abraham hinged hugely on Abraham’s having descendants, you would think that in the childbearing department things would have gone more easily. And yet in story after story we deal with some level of infertility that becomes a deep source of concern and that God eventually is said to…
Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67
Proper 9A
Last week we looked at the exceedingly fraught and difficult story of the binding (and near sacrifice) of Isaac in Genesis 22. We noted how maddeningly spare that narrative is. The story cries out—nearly screams out—for more details. Instead we get a crisp, bare-bones narrative that dispatches with the whole terrible story in a short…
Genesis 22:1-14
Proper 8A
A mere 21 chapters into the Bible, the Holy Spirit was brave when it inspired the authors and redactors of Genesis to include a scandalous story such as the one we get in Genesis 22. As some have noted across the ages, here is a narrative with so many fraught elements—not the least being things…
Genesis 21:8-21
Proper 7A
Whatever else a person may think about the Bible and about the Old Testament in particular, you have to say this: it’s honest. The text does not generally shy away from presenting less-than-savory facts about even some of the most important characters in the biblical story. It’s often the proverbial “warts and all” presentation. The…
Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7)
Proper 6A
Recently I made a multi-course gourmet dinner for my parents on the occasion of their 64th wedding anniversary. The first step was figuring out a menu and then making a plan to secure the ingredients. I ordered some venison online and picked up other ingredients in at least three other stores for this and that. …
Genesis 12:1-9
Proper 5A
Go! Have you ever been struck by the fact that this is God’s very first word to Abram? Go. Leave. Hit the road. Have you ever been struck by how unattractive this must have sounded to Abram at his advanced age? Why would he want to go anywhere? He had his home. He had established…
Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Trinity Sunday A
Science has long been fascinated with both the cosmic beginning and its ending. Both involve a certain amount of speculation, though at least with the universe’s beginning there is real evidence to look at. But since the end has not yet come, there is no data to examine, and so theory and speculation are all…
Genesis 12:1-4a
Lent 2A
“Go!” That is God’s first word to Abram. And it sets up what will become a curious dynamic for the people of God forever after. The people of God are a traveling people. Wherever “home” might be for us, it is as often as not something still up ahead of us rather than something we…
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
Lent 1A
It is one of the more important questions you could ever pose. Perhaps that is also why it is one of the most-asked questions in history: Where does evil come from? As Christians, we perhaps think that surely the answer to this vital inquiry must be somewhere in the Bible. But it’s not there. Everywhere…
The Weapons of our Warfare
The first verse of our reading is rather shocking if you think about it. “Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the Devil.” We don’t usually think of temptation as a spiritual exercise. Jesus had just been baptized. In his baptism, Jesus had taken his place with all the…
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