12th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, RCL)

Alfred Lord Tennyson called Job "the greatest poem of ancient and modern times." Excerpts are regularly included in anthologies of world literature and religious poetry. It is an undeniable literary classic.

Why is it rarely preached in Christian churches? 

If God’s response to Job in chapter 38 were meant only to shut Job up, seven verses would be sufficient. But God is only getting started here, and the exuberance of the rhetoric insists that vastly more is at stake.

There is a puzzling and disturbing detail in Mark’s account of the storm at sea, one we often do not even notice. In verse 36, we are told that when Jesus heads across the sea with his disciples, “other boats were with him.”

Like the stories that come before it, the storm at sea is a parable of reversal.

George Steiner said that "the translator invades, extracts, and brings home." In this remarkable volume, Everett Fox does all of this.

In science, when negative data isn’t reported, the result is a silence that silences. A life-saving drug or a new discovery may be missed.

These Gospel stories can seem so familiar. But sit with the disciples in the little wooden boat, and Jesus' power will render you speechless.

The RCL includes a few "optional" readings, to be subbed in as needed. Of course, it's all optional.

The answer that comes out of a tornado is not the kind of answer we want.

What makes kindness a distinctive mark of the new creation?

Monastic vows sound familiar to anyone who's been to a wedding. In both marriage and celibacy, we promise to be faithful.

The “Jesus asleep in the boat during a terrible storm” story has always seemed unfair to me. I feel for the disciples when they wake him; they are understandably angry that he doesn’t seem to care that they are about to die. I’d be just as angry at Jesus for appearing so calm in the midst of real danger.

The disciples are uncomfortable that Jesus is not acting according to the category of “concerned friend,” much less “messiah”—so they kind of yell at him. And when it comes down to it, who hasn’t yelled at God during the storms of life?

Being fearful in a storm at sea is not exactly irrational like pogonophobia (fear of beards).

It’s the second movement of Leonard Bernstein’s choral work, Chichester Psalms. A boy soprano (or a countertenor), in the “role” of the shepherd boy, David, sings in Hebrew the opening verses of Psalm 23. He is accompanied–sparingly, fittingly–by the harp. The first several measures are tender but not tentative; filled with sentiment, but without sentimentality (this per Bernstein’s instructions). When the women’s voices take over the text at גַּם כִּי־אֵלֵךְ בְּגֵיא צַלְמָוֶת . . . (Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .) there’s an ethereal echo-canon effect. This part of the movement, when executed well, is something sublime.

Is John 1 a midrash on the creation story and the song of creative Wisdom? If so, its writer has infused it with profoundest joy.

We all live out our lives in the wilderness.