Second Sunday in Lent (Year C, RCL)

The church is made of people. But they need a home.

There is no "on the mountain" and "off the mountain."

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.

I'm a bit of a congregational song nerd, and the church music folks I know talk about things like "sound pools" and "heart songs."

Sound pools are what Mennonite musician, teacher, and hymnologist Mary Oyer and her students (who became my teachers) describe as the body of music that a culture or community shares.

I am a fan of mysteries. I love watching detectives in movies and on television. I love mystery novels so much that I don’t just read them on the beach. But I’m one of those people who doesn’t try to solve the puzzle before the end of the story. I like to experience the mystery as it unfolds. I especially love unsolved mysteries, those brainteasers that simply cannot be wrapped up tightly leaving no lose ends. Stories like mountaintop visions of transfigured splendor.

In December, we lost the last hen in our household flock after a possum attack. Since then, I have heard Jesus’ avian simile in Luke 13:34 differently.

What might change if we could see something up there greater than the suffering world below? If we could get a glimpse of heaven, we would have proof—an experience that we could refer back to for the rest of our lives.

Are the people of 21st-century Israel the chosen ones of Genesis to whom Yahweh promised the land in eternal covenant? Walter Brueggemann gives a nuanced answer.

Can "Abrahamic" replace "Judeo-Christian"? And without sacrificing the integrity of three different traditions?

The Bible's images for God must be taken in an analogical sense. Yet the Bible exhibits no anxiety about using them.

Let’s build shrines, Peter says. He doesn’t know how to respond to a mystical mountaintop experience, and he’s afraid.

Hagar’s story has often been read as if it explains some inevitable animosity among the Abrahamic faiths. We should try reading it differently.

Like Willimon and Hauerwas, Donald MacKinnon began with Philippians 2.

We need the spiritual agility to recognize counter-hegemonic "citizenship in heaven" whenever and however it becomes flesh.

The Transfiguration has a hundred sermons in it. But to me the most touching element is the subplot.