14th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, RCL)

Isaac Soon employs a sociocultural model of disability as a lens for reading the apostle’s letters.

When David was anointed, no one voted.

The disciples want to know who Jesus is. The people from his hometown do not.

Rabbi Debra Robbins creates a spiritual practice around the seven psalms of the Jewish morning liturgy.

Throughout scripture, human bodies are not an obstacle to righteousness; they are its location.

Peter Hooten considers the concept in relationship to the theologian’s entire body of work.

We could see Paul’s caveats about his ecstatic experiences as false humility. But then he shows solidarity with the human condition.

Whatever else David is, he is recognizably human and not a fairy-tale king.

In times like these, we need heaven.

Is this passage more than a cautionary tale about the tendency to stuff a suitcase to the gills?

The final lesson in Discipleship 101: learning to fall

As a young minister in my early 20s, I was often admonished by the senior ministers to keep a guarded distance from laypeople. To get too close, they would say, is to become too familiar with a resulting loss of one's ministerial authority. They thought authority was protected by distance and diminished by relationships.

As Jesus prepares to send the Twelve, his experience of failure seems to color his instructions.

My Asperger's and my ministry

Once I finished working with this week’s gospel text, I went back into my files to see how many times I’ve managed to preach on it in my seven circuits through the lectionary. I found that I’ve missed it more often than not—no surprise there, as it falls at a convenient time of year for that. And when I have preached on it, the sermon has always been on one half of the text or the other—either on the scene in the Nazareth synagogue or on the sending of the disciples. I have never written a sermon that dealt with both stories.

The villagers of Nazareth knew Jesus, and they thought him to be nothing special.

Rejection has been the traveling companion of the gospel from the beginning.