ordinary time

Even with Paul's wish to serve, even with his good motives, the Lord does not answer his prayer as he asked or expected.

"The past is not over,” said Odessa Woolfolk of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Speaking to my divinity school class, Woolfolk spoke of systems that continue to oppress and seriously limit access to resources that are basic to any human being. With slavery a thing of the past, with segregation banned, with the right to vote for everyone, what is the problem? It is access.

It must have been the mother of all squalls. Some of the disciples were seasoned fishermen, skilled in the art of navigating dangerous waters. But this was a red alert. They were going to perish—and the one person who might turn the situation around was sleeping peacefully in the boat’s place of honor, the stern. They woke Jesus up with a strident “Don’t you care, Teacher?” But he did not respond to their lack of faith. Instead he responded to the peace within himself, and produced a calm that impacted nature as well as the frightened disciples.

After an attempted coup in Indonesia in 1965, headlines reported that 500,000 people were killed. What did not make the headlines was the quiet revolution that began as the wind of the Spirit began to move into a collapsed intellectual and moral vacuum. There was no ballyhoo or promotion, but simply the response of untold numbers who found in the churches a haven.

People in Jesus’ time thought that illness arose from people’s sins in a fairly immediate cause-and-effect relationship. Today we are more apt to think that illness afflicts us in a more random way.

There is an odd reticence about the healings in the lessons for this Sunday—there’s an expectation of big-bang pyrotechnics, followed by a matter-of-factness in the healings that seems to disappoint. The haughty Naaman is downright offended by the simplicity of Elisha’s prescription for curing his leprosy. I thought he would surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the Lord his God, and wave his hand over the place . . . But nothing that glamorous is planned.

We know things only insofar as we can describe their likeness.

It’s been said that the lessons of history are never clear, and when they are they’re usually wrong.

If you’re Eli, you’re not sleeping that well when the boy comes trotting in to disturb you with his nonsense.

Jonah is prophetic minimalism gone amok.

I agree with Bill Moyers, who says that poetry is the most honest language he hears today. Poetry is the instrument of the prophet. If you want to discover the real news of the day, turn off the cable news networks and take a trip to your bookshelf or the local library and read some poetry. Poetry exposes truth and stays anchored to it.

While Ezekiel’s shepherd is often on the move, any sheepherder will tell you that this is the exception rather than the rule.

Deborah, a wise woman who sat.

I’ve never been totally honest about baptismal vows. I bet Joshua would have been.

Jesus' simple summary of the law is actually complex.

I was in Cuba this summer on a mission trip, when our host pastor, Héctor Méndez, approached me, his face grave and drawn. “They have attacked a Presbyterian hospital and school in Pakistan,” he said, “and people have been killed.”

If you are ever invited to a gala event where a constitutional monarch is present, you will be told to wear a dark suit or a formal dress—no pants suits for women, no leisure suits for men. Apparently the poor guy in the parable of the wedding banquet didn’t read the small print on his invitation.

We cannot return to a pre-calf existence when the fullness of God could be seen more clearly.

Jesus offers a stick in his listeners' eye.

Power always protects itself.