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Galatians 5:1, 13-25
Proper 8C
Most of Galatians can be summed up through a subtle reversal of a traditional saying: “Don’t just do something, stand there!” Paul has whacked and whacked away at the false teaching that infiltrated Galatia—the teaching that we can and must add something to the cross of Christ for salvation to be truly effective. Get circumcised,…
Luke 8:26-39
Proper 7C
What do you suppose they were all so afraid of? After all, that is the bottom line of this dramatic and startling story in Luke 8: all the witnesses and all the townsfolk were afraid. What was it that did them in, fear-wise? Was it the sight of all those dead pigs floating in the…
Galatians 3:23-29
Proper 7C
Once Paul turned the corner on what he thought about God’s Law, he turned hard and never looked back. Indeed, Paul devotes some considerable space to this topic in his various New Testament epistles, coming up with ever-more creative ways by which to reframe the role and purpose of God’s Law. The end of Galatians…
Luke 7:36-8:3
Proper 6C
It’s such an interesting story, made the more curious by the Lectionary’s decision to extend the reading into the first 3 verses of Luke 8 where we encounter a brief list of the women who joined Jesus’ entourage of disciples and who even somehow bankrolled the ministry. Of course, that is just the capper to…
Galatians 2:15-21
Proper 6C
“I have been crucified with Christ so that it is no longer I who live but Christ in me.” What a soaring declaration. It’s one of the most famous lines in the New Testament. In fact, it’s so well known that it’s one of those verses that became context-less somewhere along the line. It’s a…
Luke 7:11-17
Proper 5C
The incident in Nain recorded in Luke 7:11-17 is like one of many gospel snapshots we find in the four gospels. At the end of the fourth gospel, the Evangelist John flatly stated that Jesus did far more than anyone had ever written down. It seems that sometimes the evangelists threw in this or that…
Galatians 1:11-24
Proper 5C
It’s not easy to preach on a text that in some ways resembles a person’s resume. Most of the verses in this Year C Lectionary reading are taken up with a brief autobiographical sketch of what happened to Paul and where he traveled in the period after Jesus confronted him on the Damascus Road. Let’s…
Luke 7:1-10
Proper 4C
The deeper you get into this brief story, the better the anonymous (and never-seen) centurion looks. First we hear this Roman higher-up has a sick servant, and just this far into the story you could read that as meaning that this man has a piece of property who is not performing well. To certain upper…
Galatians 1:1-12
Proper 4C
Good thing the Galatian Christians did not have access to Paul’s other letters. Because if they could read something like what we now call Philippians or Ephesians or almost any of the other dozen letters from Paul we have in the New Testament, surely they would be tempted to sing that song from Sesame Street:…
John 16:12-15
Trinity Sunday C
Nowhere in the gospels does Jesus talk as much about the Holy Spirit as here in John 16. Indeed, as Frederick Dale Bruner notes, the Spirit receives, at best, modest treatment and attention in the Synoptic Gospels. But then, that seems to be true of the New Testament generally. It seems that the people who…
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