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John 3:14-21
Lent 4B
This commentary originally appeared as my regular blog post on The Twelve on March 2, 2021. If you wish to see a slightly different take on this passage, you can click here to view my sermon commentary from 2018. Johnson&Johnson&Jesus If you have gone to most any news or newspaper website in the last…
John 2:13-22
Lent 3B
We are impressed very often by all the wrong things. In John 2 everyone was impressed with the physical Temple. It had been undergoing construction for over four decades already and was not even finished. It reminds me of the Ken Follett novel The Pillars of the Earth that narrates the construction of a European…
John 1:43-51
Epiphany 2B
Sample Sermon: “The Child’s Leading” Don’t you wish sometimes you could have been there, could have seen them in person? I mean the disciples and, of course, Jesus himself. You hear people say things like that once in a while. Wouldn’t it have been something to have been able to meet Peter, to shake Matthew’s…
John 1:(1-9), 10-18
Christmas 2B
As we come to the first Sunday of 2021, most of us are only too glad to have left 2020 behind. If on New Year’s Eve a year ago we toasted the happy arrival of a new year, this past week we probably did less of a toast to welcome 2021 and offered up instead…
John 1:6-8, 19-28
Advent 3B
“Among you stands one you do not know.” Those were John the Baptist’s words as recorded in John 1:26. Of course, at that time it was literally true that a quiet carpenter’s son from the backwaters of the Roman Empire was rubbing shoulders with lots of people—including the crowds that jostled together at the banks…
John 20:19-23
Pentecost A
My friend the Bible teacher/commentator Dale Bruner is a wonderful teacher of biblical stories. He is largely retired now but years ago part of Dale’s teachings usually included some dramatic re-enactments of the story at hand. He always elicited a chuckle from the class at this point in John 20 when he reaches a certain…
John 17:1-11
Easter 7A
Every once in a while someone discovers a recording that until then no one knew existed. Maybe it’s John F. Kennedy on the phone with Nikita Khrushchev. Or it’s some other famous person having a conversation with yet another high profile person. Once the recording comes out, it’s fascinating because now we get to eavesdrop…
John 14:15-21
Easter 6A
It’s possible I suppose to read a passage like John 14 and do so with a sense of detachment. Jesus packs a lot of theology into these Farewell Discourses across John 13-17 and it can be a little tough sledding to get through it all. Thus, it is tempting to be a little cut-and-dried, a…
John 14:1-14
Easter 5A
“Let not your hearts be troubled . . .” If ever there were a word for our COVID-19 moment, this would be it. And in more ways than the merely obvious one. As we will explore, most of the time when someone—even when it’s Jesus—tells you to NOT let your heart be troubled it is…
John 10:1-10
Easter 4A
Sometimes your need for a Shepherd hits home. Like during a global pandemic. I don’t know about you, but I spent the first 9 weeks of this year in one of the busiest stretches of my life. And when you run from day to day, from event to event, meeting to meeting, class to class,…
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