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Luke 4:1-13

Lent 1C

“He ate nothing during those days and at the end of them, he was hungry.”  Luke 4:2 I’ll say. This curious line in verse 2 is easy to glide past en route to the real drama to come once the devil shows up to woo Jesus to his side.  At best we see this as…

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Luke 9:28-36

Transfiguration Sunday C

Not for nothing are they called “Mountaintop Experiences”!  In the Bible, when a story takes us up to a mountaintop, it’s a fair bet that something dramatic is going to happen—indeed, it’s a fair bet that something deeply revelatory is going to happen.  Luke 9 is no exception.  But the drama up there on that…

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Luke 6:27-38

Epiphany 7C

If you are a preacher who likes to highlight the fact that Jesus was always friendliest toward the very same “sinners” that were shunned by the religious authorities of his day, then it can be a little disconcerting to hear Jesus in this passage use the word “sinners” in what sounds like a pejorative way. …

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Luke 6:17-26

Epiphany 6C

Whereas Matthew gives us the famed “Sermon on the Mount,” Luke gives us much of that same material in what is often called the “Sermon on the Plain.”  It’s difficult to know whether this is the same sermon described in two different ways by two different evangelists or whether Jesus had a few sermons in…

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Luke 5:1-11

Epiphany 5C

We’ve come to call it “the Holy Land.”  From the Mediterranean Sea in the west to the country of Jordan in the east, from Syria in the north to the Sinai in the south travel companies, tour groups, and tourists treat this piece of Middle Eastern real estate as a unity.  It’s where Jesus walked…

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Luke 4:21-30

Epiphany 4C

I don’t quite understand this passage.  Or at least I don’t understand how it turns out.  It’s not so much what is contained in this Lectionary snippet of verses 21-30 as how this call follows on what we saw last week in the first part of this story.  After all, Luke 4:15 assures us that…

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Luke 4:14-21

Epiphany 3C

Suspense!  If you stop at verse 21 as the Lectionary would have you to do and hold off on what happens in verses 22 and following next week, then a sermon on this text ends in some suspense as we wait to see how the people will react to what Jesus has just said and…

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Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Epiphany 1C

Luke’s substantial narrative powers surely did not suddenly fail him in this third chapter.  So we need a different kind of explanation for the curious way by which Luke frames up this part of the story.  Consider: First, we get the odd insertion in verses 19-20 about John’s imprisonment following his finally crossing the line…

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Luke 2:41-52

Christmas 1C

The movie Home Alone could probably have worked as slapstick comedy no matter what time of the year the story was set in.  But as it stands, the story takes place at Christmastime when a frantic family jets off to Paris for Christmas only to discover too late that they had left their youngest child…

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Luke 1:39-45 (46-56)

Advent 4C

We like musicals.  Back in the day Hollywood turned out a great many films in this genre, though in recent years the movie musical has been pretty well restricted to Disney films like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.  A recent exception was the exceptional La La Land that somehow managed to capture the power,…

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