Palm/Passion Sunday (Year 4, NL)

Small deceptions work like a narcotic, making us feel nicely respectable. Especially in church.

The Dakota Access pipeline poses a threat to indigenous people. Their resistance poses tough questions for all of us.

There are many reasons to deny Jesus, and we all have one. 

The Gospel of John uses the word "truth" more than any other book in the Bible and way more than the other Gospels combined. Not only that, but many of the most-quoted verses in John, the ones that have shaped Christian discourse over the centuries, have been concerned with the question of truth.

The callousness of Pontius Pilate was legendary: if you could choose your judge, you did not want him. Jesus cannot choose.

Christians didn’t baptize Aldo Leopold’s land ethic after the fact. They got there years before his work.

I’ve only seen three dead bodies in my life. The first was when I was 12 years old and my grandfather died at age 69. It was the first time I ever saw my father cry. At the funeral home, my sister was brave enough to reach out and touch my grandfather’s hand as it rested on his torso. Back in our seats, I asked her what his skin felt like. “Plastic,” she said.

This month in 1980, the Salvadoran archbishop was assassinated—shortly after preaching on John 12.

Aristotle writes that we would never go to the theater to see terrible things happen to a good man through no fault of his. Yet here we gather, aching for a good man’s sorrows and turning to him to make sense of our own.

Palm Sunday is a story of disappointed expectations, of what happens when someone you admire refuses to be who you think they should be.

The Jesus that John shows us in this week’s Gospel text is not a religious robot, unemotionally prepared to end it all for the cause. He sees the risks, feels them.

In this life, sanctification is gradual and difficult. Why would it be different in the life to come?

The readings for Good Friday conclude with tender and brave acts of love (John 19:38-42). Both Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus are cautious—Joseph is a secret disciple of Jesus, and Nicodemus had come to Jesus in the night, perhaps with a hood over his head and looking over his shoulder the whole way. Yet these two hesitant men demonstrate courage.

How can Paul navigate the choppy waters of a pagan environment, with its idols and temples? The obvious place to start is the Shema.

As I read the headline yesterday, my heart began to pound and my throat closed up: “School Clerk In Georgia Persuaded Gunman To Lay Down Weapons.” This was a good story—ultimately a hopeful one—but all I could see was “school” and “gunman."