Week 2 (Year 3, NL)

The Advent 3 readings present an awkward tension.

I am struck by just how different my baptism prep process is from John the Baptist’s.

His followers realized there was no quick exit from the discomfort of his words.

The first step of repentance is telling the truth about ourselves.

It's a great question to ask people. But not this person.

“If we can’t afford two boxes,” my grandmother said, “we can’t afford one.”

Hope is the content of faith. Hope is the adopted son, the grafted inheritor. If there are to be, as with Abraham’s descendants, innumerable stars and grains of sands, it will be through this boy.

God loves everything that God made, and God loves you especially, and the only way you can avoid that love is by deliberately removing yourself from it. That is how I want to preach this Gospel on Advent 3. John the Baptist tells us that we can, in fact, separate ourselves from love, and describes some of the ways how.

In response to John’s insistence that the ax is at the root of the tree, poised to cut down trees that don’t bear good fruit, three groups ask, “If that’s so, how then shall we live?”

Are the people of 21st-century Israel the chosen ones of Genesis to whom Yahweh promised the land in eternal covenant? Walter Brueggemann gives a nuanced answer.

The tension between the joy of the first three readings and the judgment of the Baptizer’s proclamation is theologically instructive. It presses us to hold the two together.

Can "Abrahamic" replace "Judeo-Christian"? And without sacrificing the integrity of three different traditions?

The Bible's images for God must be taken in an analogical sense. Yet the Bible exhibits no anxiety about using them.

Hagar’s story has often been read as if it explains some inevitable animosity among the Abrahamic faiths. We should try reading it differently.