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Matthew 5:21-37
Epiphany 6A
Say the word “radical” to the average person and the name of “Jesus” will likely not be the first thing that springs to anyone’s mind. If you think about “radical acts,” the Sermon on the Mount is unlikely to come to mind, either. Radicals throw Molotov cocktails at police and stage sit-ins and carry placards…
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Epiphany 6A
“We have the mind of Christ.” That was Paul’s amazing, lyric, profound final word in what we now call 1 Corinthians 2. It is this mindset alone, Paul claims, that allows us to see in the cross of Christ something other than a complete and senseless dead end. The cross is wisdom, not folly, but…
Matthew 5:13-20
Epiphany 5A
At a restaurant in California recently I asked the waitress if their Cioppino was good. She assured me it was. Cioppino is a wonderful seafood stew, and the server assured me theirs contained a lot of very fresh clams, shrimp, calamari, and more. I ordered it. And . . . it lacked all salt. Seemed…
1 Corinthians 2:1-12 (13-16)
Epiphany 5A
Already on the first pages of J.K. Rowling’s first “Harry Potter” book we knew she was going to come up with a whole little universe of wild and funny things. The first such gadget we encounter is Dumbledore’s “deluminator.” It was the opposite of a cigarette lighter—you did not use the deluminator to light a…
Matthew 5:1-12
Epiphany 4A
There are several ways to approach the Beatitudes. You could fruitfully consider them one at a time or you could look at the overall sweep and direction of these blessings. Since the Lectionary gives us the whole smack for just one Sunday, our best option is to look at the bigger picture and consider, in…
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Epiphany 4A
Drinking from the proverbial fire hose, that’s what these verses from 1 Corinthians are like. In verse after verse Paul scales ever higher theological heights and ever grander rhetorical flourishes as he stares, mouth agape, at the mysteries of God that all coalesce around the cross of Jesus Christ. Few passages in Scripture so swiftly…
Matthew 4:12-23
Epiphany 3A
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…
1 Corinthians 1:10-18
Epiphany 3A
In the previous sermon commentary on the first 9 verses of 1 Corinthians 1, I riffed on Tom Long’s suggestion that Paul wrote those opening verses with tongue firmly embedded in cheek. He praises the Corinthians for the very things Paul knows full well they were in deep trouble over. He names as would-be compliments…
John 1:29-42
Epiphany 2A
“The world was made through him,” the apostle John wrote earlier in this chapter, “but when he was in the world, it didn’t recognize him.” Indeed, it didn’t. Jesus existed as just another face in the crowd. Even his own cousin, John the Baptist, almost missed recognizing him. And yet hidden inside that one man…
1 Corinthians 1:1-9
Epiphany 2A
If what we call First Corinthians were a contemporary letter, then a good bit of this reading would be like focusing not on the shank or the primary content of the letter. Instead, it would be like focusing on the part of the letter at the very end that begins with “Well, that’s about all…
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