Fifth Sunday of Easter (Year B, RCL)

We church leaders need to stop fretting about our future and immerse ourselves in the baptismal waters that proclaim perfect love.

Could the Spirit's love be poured into the hearts of people untouched by the incarnation? Could non-Christians be lovers of the only God there is?

When we were baptized, we were given a new name: Branch.

The more I read the beginning of John 15, the more I come to believe that it is about the Lord’s Supper.

"Poetry invites you to have an experience. It doesn't want you to drift away into inattention. It wants to grab you."

In the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, my dad couldn't sing national songs. The Nazis saw the church's Psalter, however, as innocuous. Little did they know.

Most media representations of the biblical story are too literal. In the effort to get the story's details right, the storyteller misses the point.

When I met Jonah I noticed two things: he was wracked with overwhelming guilt and very much wanted to die, and he knew the Bible.

This Sunday’s texts from Daniel and Mark (and, perhaps, Hebrews) are quite apocalyptic in their outlook. This may lead most preachers to focus their attentions elsewhere—though post-election, many U.S. partisans may be feeling fairly apocalyptic themselves.

In the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, I have always been struck by the pronouncements of Philip’s boldness. As a young Christian, I was often called to this kind of boldness: to go out to the stranger and the foreigner and declare the good works of God.

But revisiting this passage I am struck by how weak Philip is--and how necessary this is to his ministry.

I used to read this as a story of Philip’s boldness and willingness to go even to the stranger to declare the truth. Now I understand just how little Philip knows.

A strange king is likely to have a strange kingdom, and the kingdom of Jesus is no exception. The kingdom of Christ is a multilateral community, marked by a deep mutual love and an ongoing push to ever greater love. Our difficulty is not in envisioning the image of community. Our trouble comes with the necessity of confronting those situations in which community is broken, or worse, in which human beings are attacking other human beings. What are the international implications of these readings?

Have our security measures cast out our fears? Or have they only diminished our capacity for love?