Second Sunday of Advent (Year C, RCL)

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

Paul’s words about humility should be handled with care.

Advent is also about our own coming and going, the ways we embody the reconstructive ways of the Lord.

To be wild is to be free, unbought and unbossed by the structures of power.

John is set ablaze. What about all the other characters in the Gospels?

Christmas can’t come soon enough for Tom.

John the Baptist’s proclamation for a world of Tiberiuses and Trumps

It's Advent, and accusations against prominent men are shaking things up like a highway construction project in the wilderness.

“You’ve talked about a lot of things,” says your refiner’s fire. “Which is the one that really matters?”

Luke's Gospel gives us some wondrous glimpses into the life of John the Baptist. We have the compelling story of how his father, Zechariah, heard he'd soon be a daddy, disbelieved that revelation, and spent the entire pregnancy unable to speak.

But when he is finally able to speak, he speaks!

A preacher's nightmare is to be in front of an eager congregation and realize your notes are missing. No wonder one of my favorite Bible stories is about a clergyperson who's rendered speechless.

The humanitarian plight of Syrian refugees and the terrorist threat of ISIS seem likely to dominate the cable news channels for weeks to come. But it’s unclear whether Christian preachers will continue to discuss these issues now that the season of Advent has arrived. 

On the surface there is little connection between ISIS’s campaign of terror and a season that invites us to prepare for the return of Christ. 

This week’s Gospel proclaims a baptism of repentance and forgiveness of sins. Aren’t we looking to the arrival of Christ with hopeful anticipation, rather than weighing ourselves down with how screwed up we are?

The unnamed disciple in Mark 13:1 would have been impressed not only by the temple’s splendor, but by what it represented: God’s presence with Israel. Jesus’ reply must have astounded him.

John the Baptist is an acquired taste, like roquefort. He’s complex. He is an amalgamation of unanswered questions: Is he a zealot acting out the Exodus as a kind of political comedy sketch? Is he the leader of a rival faith community, a serious threat to the fledgeling Jesus movement? Is he a kind of Enkidu figure—a fugitive of our collective consciousness from the epic Gilgamesh—who crawls out of the wilderness, learns our ways well enough and then attempts to wrestle and pin our society to the ground, only to be admired briefly and then destroyed?

Whatever John is, he’s not easy to put on a cracker.

In the Broadway show Book of Mormon, Elder Cunningham faces a problem. In an effort to gird his loins, he rocks out the hit "Man Up."

Whenever I attend Catholic mass during Advent, as I did last weekend, I’m always struck by how it is simply assumed—how it’s a liturgical . . . no, an ontological given—that Christmas is nowhere yet in sight.

The early church fathers had a saying: "The best bishop is a bad bishop." In other words, we sometimes grow more through adversity than we do by encouragement and supportive spiritual direction.

For the healing we need, we cannot do better than to rely on the ancient assurances of Zechariah's hymn. Written in a time of occupation and economic disarray that eclipses our own in its uncertainty, the hymn proclaims that we are indeed free, whatever our brokenness, to worship God without fear.