Fourth Sunday in Lent (Year C, RCL)

What comes in between being lost and being found?

Sometimes anger is a window into what needs to be mended and healed.

Paul says something really crazy here.

“If to get a good message you need to make Judaism look bad, then you don’t have a good message.”

What if we are the Pharisees?

What scripture means is not reducible to what it once meant.

A counting book that retells Jesus’ parables and a Reformation-themed alphabet book are among my favorite new children’s books. 

“One second-century pagan critic of Christianity was willing to tolerate everything else about Christians if they would only worship the gods.”

Two refreshing new books place the storyteller within the story he tells.

I often worry that churches are too full of people who are not disappointments.

It has become almost a cliché for preachers to focus on the older brother of the Prodigal Son. Too often, not even our churches let us be the fallen brother who desperately wants to come home.

People do not float through life in the bubble that is their skin. We are grounded, dependent beings that live through the lives and deaths of others.

Reading Amy-Jill Levine's Short Stories by Jesus, I kept wishing she had published it earlier. It would have saved me some mistakes in the pulpit.

The Prodigal Son is often read to mean that God loves sinners, whereas the Jews thought God only loved the righteous. This makes no sense.

For Sharon Baker, theological consistency is essential, because “our perception of God influences how we behave.”

I returned to seminary a few years back to hear a professor teach John’s gospel as a remake of the Genesis narrative. The parallel between Genesis 1 and John 1 is obvious, but if you press forward, the connections run throughout.

Some questions won't go away. The creed says Jesus was crucified "for us," but what do those two little words mean?