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…
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…
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…
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…
Mark 1:4-11
Epiphany 1B
Fans of Peter Jackson’s films in The Lord of the Rings trilogy will recall the opening sequence in the final film, The Return of the King. As the movie opens, we are taken back hundreds of years from the main action of the trilogy to the time when the Hobbit-like person Smeagol finds the Ring…
Matthew 17:1-9
Last Epiphany A
In the Harry Potter books, the students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry have to take a course in “Transfiguration.” There they learn how to change teacups into rats or flowers into candles. And to most people’s minds that is pretty much what “transfiguration” is, too: it is a change of state from…
Matthew 5:21-37
Epiphany 6A
Say the word “radical” to the average person and the name of “Jesus” will likely not be the first thing that springs to anyone’s mind. If you think about “radical acts,” the Sermon on the Mount is unlikely to come to mind, either. Radicals throw Molotov cocktails at police and stage sit-ins and carry placards…
Matthew 5:13-20
Epiphany 5A
At a restaurant in California some while back I asked the waitress if their cioppino was good. She assured me it was. Cioppino is a wonderful seafood stew, and the server assured me theirs contained a lot of very fresh clams, shrimp, calamari, and more. I ordered it. And . . . it lacked all…
Matthew 5:1-12
Epiphany 4A
Suppose you could combine the personality traits of the Beatitudes and put them all into one person. What would Mr. or Miss Beatitude look like? Well, he would be consistently kind and yet also a bit shy, shunning the limelight. He would always downplay his own actions by claiming they were never enough to achieve…
Matthew 4:12-23
Epiphany 3A
We’ve come to call it “the Holy Land.” From the Mediterranean Sea in the west to the country of Jordan in the east, from Syria in the north to the Sinai in the south, travel companies, tour groups, and tourists treat this piece of Middle Eastern real estate as a unity. It’s where Jesus walked…
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