Luke 14

I didn’t need more candles or journaling. I needed solidarity with others.

For Jesus, the inverse of scarcity isn’t abundance—it’s accumulation.

Erin Raffety’s ethnographic study calls churches to repentance.

While he has everyone’s attention, Jesus challenges the conventional dinner seating practices.

Amy Kenny’s call for disability justice leads with righteous anger but offers grace.

The Bible gives no sense that the family is an end in itself.

Surely he didn't mean I have to give up my books.

Proverbs warns us against the culture of self-aggrandizement.

Jesus isn’t known for being on the winning side. His constant mantra is come and die.

Jesus and Maimonides are drinking from the same well: the book of Proverbs.

There had to be something more to Jesus.

We see. We taste. We touch. We smell. We hear. To be human is to move through time and space guided by our senses. Reading this passage from Luke, I think about the sensory onslaught that defines my existence.

In this week’s Gospel text, the piercing hyperbole about family and discipleship normally receives top billing homiletically. However, I am newly struck by Jesus’ words regarding building a tower.

Jesus offers his unsolicited advice fully aware of the jousting for prominence that occurs in our social spaces. He sees our mad dash to the front row so that we can be seen by the chief executive officer, the potential major donor, or the bishop.

For those who are uncomfortable with any suggestion that our future is in our own hands, this might be one of those weeks to abandon the assigned texts on theological grounds. (It is extra tempting given the occasion of “Rally Sunday.”) In Deuteronomy we hear that if we obey we shall live and be blessed, but if our heart turns away we shall perish. And then very directly, “Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”

Really?

To build stronger communities, we need to get in the habit of recognizing what undergirds our relationships. We can't afford to take it for granted.

“When you give a banquet,” Jesus said, “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,” but he didn’t say anything about atheists.

In Williamsburg, Virginia, where I live, the fraternities and sororities of The College of William & Mary invite new members in (and leave others out). What's in and what's out translates cunningly into who's in and who's out.