Third Sunday in Lent (Year 3, NL)

It has become almost a cliché for preachers to focus on the older brother of the Prodigal Son. Too often, not even our churches let us be the fallen brother who desperately wants to come home.

Reading Amy-Jill Levine's Short Stories by Jesus, I kept wishing she had published it earlier. It would have saved me some mistakes in the pulpit.

The Prodigal Son is often read to mean that God loves sinners, whereas the Jews thought God only loved the righteous. This makes no sense.

For Sharon Baker, theological consistency is essential, because “our perception of God influences how we behave.”

My youngest child hasn’t missed a church choir rehearsal in five years. But when the ten-year-old went too rehearsal one day recently, she was one of only two people to show up. It was a hard evening for the interim music director—it’s hard to be a resilient leader when your numbers are dwindling.

When I met Jonah I noticed two things: he was wracked with overwhelming guilt and very much wanted to die, and he knew the Bible.

Offering the elements to the unbaptized can be seen as a development and not a revolution, but it is a significant change. Is it a good one?

Salvation requires repentance. But of what do the righteous repent?

In Bosnia, I was reminded that the God who shows up at communion is a God who brazenly seeks us out of the crowd.

A few years ago when Tomas wrecked a car, the police didn't care about his immigration status. But times have changed.

As we move deeper into Lent and its emphasis on repentance, spiritual introspection, self-examination and self-denial, many of us choose to practice Lenten disciplines. If we have become involved in the season’s imagery and expectations, we may find ourselves reading biblical texts from a spare and minimalist perspective.