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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…
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Proper 20C
In the United States, this September Sunday falls about seven weeks before the next presidential election. And it’s been an ugly season in what has seemingly become the nation’s never-ending presidential campaign. But it’s no longer just politics as usual that unsettles. No, it’s the deep, deep partisan divides that have taken hold the last…
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…
1 Timothy 1:12-17
Proper 19C
In the first century—and really for a large chunk of the church’s history—most everything a given person knew had to be memorized and carried around in one’s head. There were no published materials, no pamphlets or tracts or catechisms. Not surprisingly, then, by the time the Pastoral Epistles were written it is clear that the…
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…
Philemon 1:1-21
Proper 18C
Garry Wills’s book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, is a fascinating study of one of the world’s more famous speeches. Wills claims that in the Gettysburg Address Abraham Lincoln, in the span of a scant 272 words which took him all of three minutes to deliver, forever altered our understanding of the…
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…
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Proper 17C
No one knows exactly who the audience of Hebrews was. We tend to think of the earliest Christians as something of a rag-tag group made up mostly of people of modest means at best and perhaps populated primarily by poorer folks. Yet there are just enough warnings in the New Testament about not getting carried…
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…
Hebrews 12:18-29
Proper 16C
Reading this passage creates the sensation of watching a tennis match. In tennis if a good volley is going back and forth, then those in the stands are constantly swiveling their heads. They look right, then left. Right, then left again. Right, Left, Right, Left. Now Serena hits, then Venus. Serena, Venus, and so on….
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