23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A, RCL)

The lamb’s blood isn’t insurance against the wrath of God. It is a proclamation of fealty.

The only place in the Gospels where Jesus says anything about the church is Matthew 18—and not insignificantly, he brings it up in terms of conflict management.

How can these values be lived out in our traditions and in our assemblies?

Justice is complicated--even when it is the law of God.

Loving the neighbor with whom we disagree

A plague is being visited on all of us, but not evenly.

Hope smells like barbecue.

On World Communion Day, I sat in the balcony. The view was stunning.

It’s troubling to imagine the Son of man arriving with criminal intent.

David Wallace-Wells charts a path for life in the wake of global warming.

Christ’s love binds up our broken hearts and broken ways.

At a #decolonizeLutheranism forum, I thought of Matthew 18.

I have a friend who visits his mother's burial site each year on the anniversary of her death. When the day comes, the mood is always solemn and deeply reflective--and tremendously difficult for other people in his life. What they don't know is that this annual ritual is generative, corrective. It helps anchor my friend for the rest of the year. 

I have another friend who almost never visits his parents' gravesite.

New communities spring up at coffeehouses, on Habitat for Humanity worksites, or at 5k races. What makes any of them a church?

Slaughtering animals, washing feet—I can smell the rooms in both Exodus and John.

I loved writing Wearing God in part because it allowed me to rove around archives from more or less every century of the Christian past. The biblical images for God that most (American?) churches today largely ignore were decidedly not ignored in earlier eras.

The household I grew up in did not have a lot of rules. My parents were first-generation immigrants who worked 12 hours a day, six days a week. So even if we'd had a lot of rules, they would not have been home to enforce most of them.