22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C, RCL)

What are we going to do? We have some options.

For Jesus, the inverse of scarcity isn’t abundance—it’s accumulation.

Erin Raffety’s ethnographic study calls churches to repentance.

One form of ancient instruction was paraenesis, which lists various rules without a clear outline or progression of thought.

While he has everyone’s attention, Jesus challenges the conventional dinner seating practices.

Amy Kenny’s call for disability justice leads with righteous anger but offers grace.

Kara Slade’s scathing yet incisive volume abounds with examples of modern hubris.

Putting flesh on the bones of justice

Proverbs warns us against the culture of self-aggrandizement.

And that conversation’s inevitable limits

Jesus and Maimonides are drinking from the same well: the book of Proverbs.

The prescription for the persistent malady of God’s people

We see. We taste. We touch. We smell. We hear. To be human is to move through time and space guided by our senses. Reading this passage from Luke, I think about the sensory onslaught that defines my existence.

Jesus offers his unsolicited advice fully aware of the jousting for prominence that occurs in our social spaces. He sees our mad dash to the front row so that we can be seen by the chief executive officer, the potential major donor, or the bishop.

The wrenching dislocations of World War II were often pitilessly ignored by the world. What story will be told of our time, and of us?

Richard Lischer suggests that one of the ways to organize a sermon is around a “master metaphor”—that key image on which the sermon’s progress and structure can hang. More often than not, the scripture passage itself gives us the master metaphor.

If it’s difficult for listeners today to connect with the Bible’s injunctions against idolatry because our own idolatry looks so different, the metaphor of God as “fountain of living water” being forsaken for self-dug, cracked cisterns is striking.