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Mark 7:24-37
Proper 18B
Digging Into the Text: The RCL throws another curve ball this week. Last week it was cutting out part of the text; this week it’s piling one story on another. So, the choice is to either preach both, or skip one of them to concentrate on the other. Preaching both might not be the best…
James 2:1-10, (11-13), 14-17
Proper 18B
In God’s Politics Jim Wallis describes an experiment a seminarian once conducted. He cut every text about the poor out of an old Bible. It took him, Wallis reports, “a very long time.” “When,” concludes Wallis, “the zealous seminarian was done with all his editorial cuts, that old Bible would hardly hold together, it was…
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Proper 17B
Digging Into the Text: Once again the RCL takes a longer, complicated text and tries to make it briefer and simpler with some judicious chopping and trimming. Sometimes this move toward simplicity actually makes the preacher’s task more difficult, even as it raises the suspicions of the more knowledgeable members of the congregation. That may…
James 1:17-27
Proper 17B
Those who dare to preach and teach James must be theologically disciplined. Its interpretation is, after all, perhaps more than that of any other epistle, if not any New Testament book, especially vulnerable to moralizing. Even a quick scan of contemporary sermons and writings reveals not just a love for the book, but also a…
John 6:56-59
Proper 16B
But how does it all end? After plunking us down in John 6 for the whole of August in Year B, the Lectionary puts on the brakes before we can get to the end of the story where the REACTION of the crowds to all of this is recorded. So I would suggest to my…
Ephesians 6:10-20
Proper 16B
No matter when and where you read this, you are under attack. After all, Ephesians 6:10-20 at least implies that those who read, study, consider, proclaim and hear it are under siege. So Paul summons his readers to properly arm ourselves for that battle lest we go down to at least temporary defeat in the…
John 6:51-58
Proper 15B
In her short story “The River,” Flannery O’Connor depicts a child who actually drowns when trying to baptize himself in a river. After this startling story was published, someone asked O’Connor about this grotesque depiction of baptism. O’Connor’s critics thought this story was too extreme. But her goal was to remind her readers of how…
Ephesians 5:15-20
Proper 15B
Intelligence doesn’t necessarily equal wisdom. In fact, some of us can identify people who rank among the highest on the intelligence quotient (IQ) scale but rank among the lowest on the “wisdom quotient” scale. Perhaps that’s why our text’s Paul feels the need not to tell his readers to be “intelligent” or “smart,” but to…
John 6:35, 41-51
Proper 14B
“Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert yet they died.” That’s what Jesus said and it’s a pretty easy verse to cruise past and not much ponder. I mean, of course those people died—in fact, they had died about 1,000 years ago!! And since no one even a millennium earlier had ever said manna…
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
Proper 14B
“Imitation” may be, as Charles Colton once famously wrote, “the sincerest of flattery.” However, some attempts at imitation may also be the sincerest of sheer folly. A son may, after all, flatter his mother by trying to successfully cook like she does. Who can, however, as Paul’s calls us in Ephesians 5:2, imitate God? Even…
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