26th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C, RCL)

In Oslo, the freeze-thaw cycle of a warm winter made my bike commute unpleasant. Elsewhere, it's a matter of survival.

The Prodigal Son is often read to mean that God loves sinners, whereas the Jews thought God only loved the righteous. This makes no sense.

"Ephphatha!" Jesus cries in Mark 7. "Open up!" In that passage the command is specifically about hearing and speech. But the image seems emblematic of the gospel in many ways.

Security and risk are nothing new. Today's biblical texts deal not with stocks and bonds exactly, but with living in the real circumstances of a difficult and uncertain world while also accepting the possibility of good, of help and support, comfort and security.

At one end of Matthew, Jesus goes free. At the other, cruel, ritualized slaughter befalls him.

Next to the window in my study, where I can’t but see it every day, there’s a framed cartoon from an old edition of the National Lampoon. It’s a spoof of a Medici rose window from the cathedral in Florence, and depicts a laughing camel leaping with ease through the eye of a needle. The superscription reads: “a recurring motif in works commissioned by the wealthier patrons of Renaissance religious art,” while the Latin inscription on the window itself is “Dives Vincet,”or “Wealth Wins!”