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Luke 16:19-31
Proper 21C
The author Robert Farrar Capon was a master of parabolic embellishment, being highly adept at bringing these ancient stories up-to-date through vivid contemporary language and imagery. Sometimes Capon also did what those of us who preach occasionally do as well: he’d name the characters. And so in the Parable of the Prodigal Son maybe we’ll…
Luke 16:1-13
Proper 20C
Luke 16:1-13 is the oddest of all Jesus’ parables. You can read the whole thing once, twice, three times and the precise meaning of it remains mysteriously elusive. The shank of the problem is that the “hero” of this parable–the figure Jesus holds up as somehow or another having something to teach “the children of…
Luke 15:1-10
Proper 19C
In the United States for certain—but perhaps in other parts of the world, too—it will escape the notice of very few that this Sunday falls on the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the 3,000 lives that were lost in New York, in Washington, and in a field in Pennsylvania. We tend to mark…
Luke 14:25-33
Proper 18C
Some while ago on TV I saw a news profile of megachurch pastor Joel Osteen. Peppered throughout the interview with this pastor were brief video clips showing him preaching to his vast congregation that numbers into the tens of thousands. The people of the congregation stretch out before this pastor like a vast sea of…
Luke 14:1, 7-14
Proper 17C
Tell any average child that she is forbidden to look at pages 67-82 of the book sitting on the coffee table in the living room and you can all-but make certain that the first chance that child gets, she’s going to whisk that book to her room and turn directly to page 67! The Revised…
Luke 13:10-17
Proper 16C
When the truth humiliates you, you are humiliated indeed. Worse, when a truth so obvious that it can be stated in a sentence or two humiliates you, then your shame is profound. It’s one thing if a philosopher builds an elaborate argument to disprove some point you had made but it’s another thing if a…
Luke 12:49-56
Proper 15C
Whoa! What a passage. We practically need asbestos gloves or very thick oven mitts just to pick these verses up. This thing is white hot! What prompted this from our Lord? It’s maybe difficult to know but from the looks of the passage, it appears that just possibly there were some who were trying to…
Luke 12:32-40
Proper 14C
Luke 12 is like drinking from a fire hose, or maybe several different fire hoses at once with different flavors of water from each. Throughout Luke 12—and certainly in the nine verses of this particular reading from the Year C Lectionary—Jesus is doing some classic pearl-stringing in uttering one beatitude, saying, warning, or prediction after…
Luke 12:13-21
Proper 13C
Sometimes it is surprising what people will ask a pastor. Most pastors field their fair share of biblical and theological questions. Often people will call with a follow-up query to a topic that cropped up in a sermon. Those are the kinds of pastoral inquiries one would expect. Once in a while, though, pastors get…
Luke 11:1-13
Proper 12C
The Lord’s Prayer is hands down one of the most famous prayers ever. So how ironic it is to notice that in Luke’s presentation of this prayer, the narrative details are very sparse. Today if we were documenting the first-ever presentation of something that went on to become very famous and momentous, we’d want to…
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