Home » New Testament »
Mark 3:20-35
Proper 5B
There is an old saying that sometimes a person “can’t see the forest for the trees.” The idea is that sometimes we become so wrapped up in one thing that we lose sight of the larger picture. Sometimes this can be humorous. So on a TV show you may see a man who is obsessed…
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Proper 5B
There’s no two ways about it: Paul’s second letter to the folks in Corinth can be tough to read. When Paul is not ranting and raving against his “super apostle” foes who have been badmouthing him up one side of the street and down the other, Paul also makes it clear that he himself has…
Mark 2:23-3:6
Proper 4B
There is no joy or delight in any of life, including on the Sabbath, if rules eclipse all else. In Mark 2 and 3 Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisees ends on a note of murder. Just about the last word in the whole story is “kill.” It’s only appropriate, of course, since the Pharisees had…
2 Corinthians 4:5-12
Proper 4B
In her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion recounts what she thought about during the year following her husband’s sudden death. Near the end of December 2003, Didion and her husband were sitting down for dinner, having just come back from visiting their gravely ill daughter in the hospital. Her husband John was…
John 3:1-17
Trinity Sunday B
I wonder what Nicodemus was thinking about when he walked home that night. My guess is that it wasn’t the Doctrine of the Trinity! Yet this is the Year B passage assigned for Trinity Sunday. So what did he ponder? No clue. John doesn’t tell us. That’s ironic seeing as, according to John’s reportage at…
Romans 8:12-17
Trinity Sunday B
It should be no mystery why the Lectionary chose this passage as a Trinity Sunday text. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all nicely on display in these half-dozen verses. Of course, if you also chose the Romans 8 Lectionary text option for Pentecost last week, then you realize that for some reason the Lectionary…
John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15
Pentecost B
Well before Jesus ever preached his first sermon, there was John the Baptist. Long before Jesus ever uttered a parable or healed a blind person, there was John. John had come to prepare the way for his cousin Jesus. And when John preached about this great and coming One, he talked a lot about the…
Acts 2:2-21
Pentecost B
Throughout nearly all of recorded human history, people’s inability to communicate with each other has divided us. So for people to somehow come (and stay) together, something dramatic must happen. In fact, since human efforts to fully unify people have proved largely futile or temporary, we might add that something dramatic must happen to us….
Romans 8:22-27
Pentecost B
Theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie has pointed out that all tonal music in the Western world relies on patterns of tension and resolution. Songs begin somewhere, take us on a journey through a variety of ensuing notes and melodies, and then finally bring us back to where we started. It is a pattern of what…
John 17:6-19
Easter 7B
“You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.” That is a saying of my former colleague Ron Nydam. And he’s right. Worse yet, we all know that you cannot insure the happiness of your children, either. And that truth is married to another undeniable fact and that is this: the wider world in which we…
Content related to New Testament