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Luke 13:1-9
Lent 3C
Someday I’d like it explained to me why the Lectionary would assign the final verses of a chapter for the week prior to looking at its first 9 verses. Nobody reads the Bible backwards like that so it’s not the least bit clear to me why preaching it this way makes any sense, either. In…
Luke 13:31-35
Lent 2C
Luke knew how to spin a tale! Today he’d likely be a best-selling writer no matter what his genre: novels, biographies, essays. Luke had style, narrative panache. Dip into any of his stories in The Gospel that bears his name or in The Book of Acts (that he also authored) and you see this readily….
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…
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…
Luke 4:21-30
Epiphany 4C
I confess that 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 14-21 as in what follows when the people in the synagogue turn on Jesus with a murderous ferocity. After all, Luke 4:15 assures…
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…
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
Epiphany 1C
Luke’s substantial narrative powers surely did not all 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…
Luke 2:41-52
1st Sunday after Christmas C
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…
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. Musicals on Broadway, on the other hand, are as popular as ever. When I was in…
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