Fourth Sunday in Lent (Year C, RCL)

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?

My youngest child hasn’t missed a church choir rehearsal in five years. But when the ten-year-old went too rehearsal one day recently, she was one of only two people to show up. It was a hard evening for the interim music director—it’s hard to be a resilient leader when your numbers are dwindling.

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.

Offering the elements to the unbaptized can be seen as a development and not a revolution, but it is a significant change. Is it a good one?

Salvation requires repentance. But of what do the righteous repent?

In Bosnia, I was reminded that the God who shows up at communion is a God who brazenly seeks us out of the crowd.

As we move deeper into Lent and its emphasis on repentance, spiritual introspection, self-examination and self-denial, many of us choose to practice Lenten disciplines. If we have become involved in the season’s imagery and expectations, we may find ourselves reading biblical texts from a spare and minimalist perspective.