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John 7:37-39
Pentecost A
The setting is the end of the Festival of Booths (or Tabernacles). The Festival remembers the way that God provided for the Israelites in their desert wanderings and is when they ask for God to send rain for the year’s crops. The people also looked to the future hope promised in passages like Ezekiel 47,…
John 17:1-11
Easter 7A
Jesus speaks the heart of the Trinity out loud in prayer for the disciples to hear. He speaks in the third person about himself at the beginning, but very quickly moves more passionately, intimately, and emphatically into the first person. This only deepens the significance of the words’ revelation about the heart of God. And…
John 14:15-21
Easter 6A
We are in the Easter season and we’ve spent the better part of it remembering all of the different ways that Jesus spoke of the Easter power to come even while he was still here with his disciples. We pick up this week right where we left off last week. Jesus called himself the way,…
John 14:1-14
Easter 5A
As I spend more time journeying with Jesus, I’m coming to realize that Thomas’s question, “How can we know the way?” could be read in any number of ways. There’s the literal reading that sounds a bit like a prayer in the fog: “Lord, we don’t see the road that you’re telling us to take,…
John 10:1-10
Easter 4A
The lectionary calendar separates Jesus healing the man born blind (chapter 9) with Jesus’s “I am” proclamation here at the beginning of chapter 10 by a number of weeks—the first being in Lent and now here in Easter. A quick review of the man’s experience of being kicked out of the synagogue makes it pretty…
John 20:19-31
Easter 2A
Those Jesus called “brothers” last week have been told the news about Jesus’s resurrection by Mary Magdalene (v. 18) and they’ve come together, not out of hope or wonder, but John says, out of fear. For all intents and purposes, I think that we are supposed to understand that the disciples are in hiding because…
John 11:11-45
Lent 5A
Resurrection stories in Lent really catch our attention. But really, the resurrection event is a backdrop for the experience of faith for a number of characters. The most prominent, of course, are our sisters Martha and Mary. The gospel writer tells us at the beginning of this story what happens at the beginning of the…
John 9:1-41
Lent 4A
Our ability to take a beautiful miracle and turn it into a trial of belonging is truly a pox upon our people. The idea that people make up stories about our sufferings and judge us is also a reason to be sad. But the hope that undergirds this passage is that Jesus heals, Jesus dispels…
John 4:5-42
Lent 3A
The John lectionary narratives are especially long over the next few weeks. There is something lovely about simply sitting and reading a story together as a congregation and seeing what parts grab the community’s attention. In fact, that’s not a bad strategy for choosing where to put your focus as a preacher. For me, the…
John 6:24-35: Never Go Hungry: Proper 13B
In the Simon and Garfunkel song Mrs. Robinson, we hear the line, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you. What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson? Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.” Originally part of the soundtrack for the film The Graduate, the song became one of the…
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