Reading for Preaching
The Odyssey of Homer
“Welcoming the Stranger”
Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith
Additional content related to Hospitality
Mark 10:2-16
These two texts are more than a bit difficult to homiletically combine. They mostly share a setting, as Jesus and the disciples transition from a conversation with the Pharisees and enter yet another house where children are present. In terms of the lectionary sequence, we’ll be staying put in chapter ten for the whole month…
Mark 9:30-37
God gives us many opportunities to learn humility. As we join Jesus and the disciples on the road, we are met with an all too recognizable human pattern of response to such chances. Jesus has returned to what’s about to happen, talking with his disciples about his suffering, dying, and rising while they walk. This…
Mark 6:1-13
There are many reasons to go home, and there are plenty of reasons some of us would rather not. Being fully differentiated, Jesus didn’t have the same baggage as some of us do related to our hometowns, but that doesn’t mean the welcome wagon rolls out for the Son of Man. Nazareth was a small…
Exodus 12:1-14
Comments, Questions and Observations: Of all the strange details of this strange meal, isn’t it a bit odd that God tells the people of Israel, “When I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.” As though the…
Matthew 10:40-42
This is the end of a very long section on what the disciples will experience as Jesus sends them out to the harvest of need (Matthew 9.35-10.8 from a few weeks ago). It seems odd to me that Jesus is saying this to the disciples. I mean, rather than the disciples, isn’t this the message…
Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7)
Recently I made a multi-course gourmet dinner for my parents on the occasion of their 64th wedding anniversary. The first step was figuring out a menu and then making a plan to secure the ingredients. I ordered some venison online and picked up other ingredients in at least three other stores for this and that. …
Genesis 12:1-9
Go! Have you ever been struck by the fact that this is God’s very first word to Abram? Go. Leave. Hit the road. Have you ever been struck by how unattractive this must have sounded to Abram at his advanced age? Why would he want to go anywhere? He had his home. He had established…
Palm Sunday: Salvation’s Hospitality
In the summer of 1991 my wife and I spent some time traveling in Germany. One of our stops was a two-day visit to a pastor and his wife in Wittenberg. At that time, the fall of the Berlin Wall was still a very recent event. What had been the communist-dominated East Germany was still…
Luke 16:1-13
This set of verses is a difficult one to bring clarity to while preaching. Forget the fact that there are any number of interpretative directions you can take when sharing this parable: for every way this story can be understood, a fair amount of detail will need to be explained in order for the interpretation…
Luke 14:1,7-14
Jan Richardson describes this text as one of the many that exemplify “the endless wisdom of the table.” Of course, the wisdom comes from how Jesus transforms the space in order to reform the community. Having just spent time in one last week, the lectionary skips over a Sabbath healing story (verses 2-6) to bring…
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
“Just tell me what I have to do, Pastor!” I suspect that nearly all of us have heard variations on this theme. This Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson seems to offer help in answering such questions. That may, in fact, be a reason why proclaimers’ attention is often most quickly drawn to its ethical pronouncements. Hebrews 13…
Luke 11:1-13
Coming straight on the heels of Jesus telling Martha that her sister Mary will not be deprived of sitting in the presence of God, Luke depicts Jesus as doing the same. The stories are less chronologically connected (i.e., there is no indication that this scene immediately played out after his night as a guest at…
Matthew 21:23-32
A while back I heard an old Jewish witticism in which someone asks his rabbi, “Why do rabbis always answer a question with another question?” to which the rabbi replied, “Why shouldn’t a rabbi answer a question with another question?” So also in Matthew 21: Jesus side-steps the question of the Pharisees as to the…
Romans 12:9-21
When my family travelled in Asia we saw nearly countless products that were imitation brands. One of our favorites was “Poma” (not Puma) athletic shoes. Those knock-offs, in fact, looked quite a bit like the real thing. But they were actually low-quality counterfeits. When he invites his readers to “love” in this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson,…
Matthew 10:40-42
“I have always relied on the kindness of strangers.” That is the famous closing line spoken by the character Blanche DuBois in the play A Streetcar Named Desire. In Matthew 10 Jesus basically tells the disciples that they, too, must rely on the kindness of strangers when they go out to proclaim the good news…
Galatians 3:23-29
Too many white Americans including Christians have made a mess of race relations by endorsing the horrors of things like Native American displacement, slavery, Japanese-American internment camps and even real estate redlining. In fact, whether it’s in connection with the abomination that is racial profiling or the controversy that surrounds affirmative action, we still manage…
2 Corinthians 6:1-13
Ouch! We have been noticing recently that 2 Corinthians can be a hard letter to read. There is so much personal, professional, and pastoral pain in the background for Paul. But at the end of this Lectionary selection Paul brings the hammer down pretty hard: he is being perfectly loving toward the Corinthians—as he always…
Matthew 21:23-32
A while back I heard an old Jewish witticism in which someone asks his rabbi, “Why do rabbis always answer a question with another question?” to which the rabbi replied, “Why shouldn’t a rabbi answer a question with another question?” So also in Matthew 21: Jesus side-steps the question of the Pharisees as to the…
Luke 10:38-42
Few things are easier than taking a portion of Scripture, isolating it from its original context, and then using this now rarified, out-of-context pericope to serve as some universal statement. This brief lection from Luke 10:38-42 is a classic example. How many times hasn’t this gospel snippet been used to prove that hearing the word…
Luke 10:25-37
If you are a baseball fan, you remember that bizarre play in Game 5 of last October’s playoffs between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Texas Rangers. The game was tied 2-2 in the 7th inning and Texas had a man on third base. The Toronto pitcher had just thrown a pitch to the Texas…
1 Peter 4:1-11
Comments, Observations, and Questions to Consider: Both new Christians and suffering Christians wonder “what kind of life have I gotten into?” In the first half of chapter 4 (our text), Peter addresses the worldview issues of the new believer; in the second half, the worry issues of the suffering one. These former pagans learn this…
3 John
Comments and Observations: It’s not too difficult to think of influential Christians throughout the course of history. The Apostle Paul traveled the world, established numerous churches, stood trial for advancing the gospel, and wrote numerous letters that have become part of the New Testament. After his conversion in 387, Saint Augustine became one of the…
Preaching Connection: Hospitality