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Romans 4:13-25
Lent 2B
Life comes from death. Perhaps there has never been a more counter-intuitive statement but there it is at the very heart of the Gospel: life comes from death. But since none of us is capable of bringing life out of death, that paradoxical statement is also a huge red arrow pointing straight at grace. It’s…
Mark 1:9-15
Lent 1B
Lent begins in the wilderness. And it’s not a terribly safe place to be all things being equal. Some years ago after a seminar I was attending in Tucson, Arizona, wrapped up around the noon hour, my wife and I decided to check out a nearby National Park. We took a big bottle of water…
1 Peter 3:18-22
Lent 1B
This is a perfectly good passage selection for the Lectionary but it does carve this a bit out of context. If you look closely and glance just above where verse 18 starts, then you will see that the main thrust of this part of 1 Peter—like a good bit of the letter—ties in with our…
Mark 9:2-9
Epiphany 6B
“This is my Son, whom I love. Look at him. Isn’t this display something! I mean, just get a load of this light show!” That’s what I’d expect God the Father to say. But he doesn’t. Why not? Isn’t it about the light show? We have seen such visual spectacles. They typically happen every year…
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
Epiphany 6B
It is Transfiguration Sunday and so naturally the Lectionary gravitates toward passages that talk about light and shining and illumination. On that score, these verses carved out of 2 Corinthians 4 fit the bill. But it’s an open question whether this passage is finally all about that light imagery—it may be more about the nature…
Mark 1:29-39
Epiphany 5B
Usually we are far too casual about God’s kingdom. “Your kingdom come, your will be done” we say each time we intone the Lord’s Prayer, but when we finish our prayer and open our eyes, we do not see any such kingdom. It is difficult for us to conceive of a kingdom that is not…
1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Epiphany 5B
It is not too difficult to take Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 9 and interpret them in a quite uncharitable way. Because on the face of it, one could allege that Paul here presents himself as human Jell-O, as a chameleon, as a glad-hander who will say or do anything to ingratiate himself to whomever…
Mark 1:21-28
Epiphany 4B
It was the Sabbath and so, naturally, the Jews of Capernaum went to the synagogue. Some of them went sleepily, others went with a great weariness following a busy week of work. Still others trekked over in a rather irritable mood for who knows why–maybe it had been no more than that they were out…
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Epiphany 4B
A few years back a colleague of mine was a pastor in the Greater Toronto Area. The Lectionary called for a sermon on 1 Corinthians 8 and so my friend did his level best to translate these ancient words into a contemporary setting. Mostly he worked hard to take the “food sacrificed to idols” line…
Mark 1:14-20
Epiphany 3B
If Mark were a Broadway play, then the first 13 verses are like the overture. As we come to verse 14, the curtain is about to go up on the drama and when it does we see . . . Galilee. We’re not in a bigger city like Jerusalem or Sepphoris or Rome. Nope, little…
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