Luke

The unnamed woman’s healing in this week’s Gospel reading is a story of expansion, revelation, vision widened by grace. There’s more to the story, however.

Fire is a dangerous image for Jesus to use, even if he doesn’t mean it literally. What kind of God would bring fire to the earth?

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.

At first read, this Sunday's Colossians text landed for me with a bit of a thud between the rich narrative images of Genesis and Luke. But the text engages the themes of calling and vocation in important ways. 

Paul says the hidden life is a moral one, putting off vices like a set of dirty old clothes.

What is the point of prayer? The question is writ large in the texts from both the Hebrew scripture and the Gospel for this Sunday. The terrain is fraught with places to trip and fall.

Much is made in our time of creativity, imagination, and vision. Some lament that we have lost these qualities as a civilization; others search and find pockets of each like a light in the dark night.

The prayers of the people call us. When we answer, we invite the possibility that it is we who will be poor, hungry, sick, and in prison.

The prayers of the people call us. When we answer, we invite the possibility that it is we who will be poor, hungry, sick, and in prison.

God’s experience of hospitality—in the mysterious travelers and in the person of Jesus—inspires us to think beyond an Abraham-vs.-Sarah or Martha-vs.-Mary divide.

The invitation follow me is a common refrain in the ministry of Jesus. In our Gospel text for this week, the call to follow is intensified. Jesus has now “set his face toward Jerusalem,” and his response to someone who wants to follow him is an extreme one.

How do we respond to the issues that trouble people deeply? Jesus and the lawyer have a proper debate, but the lawyer continues to wrestle and cannot let go.

Transformation often has a price. There is a cost to freedom, even freedom from demons.

Jesus sends his disciples out “like lambs in the midst of wolves.” We live in a time when intimacy is erased, privacy laughable, rhetoric rude and rusty. The notion of going out as lambs to wolves is apt, even if the wolves and lambs may be interchangeable.

It's up to pastors to remind each other to talk to people instead of about them.

Growing up it was in the kitchen every Sunday where I would witness the most frenetic, clamorous work of our church community.

Growing up it was in the kitchen every Sunday where I would witness the most frenetic, clamorous work of our church community.

The satisfaction theory of the atonement centers on debt, humanity’s debt to God. It’s often criticized for its gruesome picture of God. But it also paints a weird picture of Jesus: Christ the Debt Buyer.

The satisfaction theory of the atonement centers on debt, humanity’s debt to God. It’s often criticized for its gruesome picture of God. But it also paints a weird picture of Jesus: Christ the Debt Buyer.