29th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, RCL)

James and John don’t want power; they want a special level of intimacy with Jesus.

Bumbling along in the footsteps of Melchizedek

A worshiper can go a long time without any idea of who Melchizedek is and what it means to be a priest according to his order.

“No evil shall befall us,” said St. Anthony in the desert, preachers during the Rwandan genocide, and Americans after 9/11.

Hans Boersma sees scripture as more open to imaginative reading than our modern methods permit. The key is faith in Christ.

And what would happen if we didn't?

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.

For there to be a heresy about the cross, there would have to be an orthodoxy about it. Michael Gorman argues that contentions over how Jesus saves lead to an inadequate grasp of what the Passion means and does.

Stephen Jay Gould regarded science and religion as addressing different kinds of questions. Owen Gingerich goes a step farther with a more nuanced approach.

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.

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

This week’s readings are generally about the faithful. Deuteronomy describes God’s faithful care of a “wandering Aramean” or “Syrian about to perish”—most likely Jacob. The psalm echoes God’s faithful care of God’s own, safely abiding in the shadow of the Almighty. Paul reminds the Romans how uncomplicated it is to come by salvation: it only takes faithful hearts and faithful speech. And we see Jesus’ profound faithfulness as he survives the devil’s temptations in the wilderness.

Preaching these texts looks easy enough, maybe even uninspiring. It doesn’t get much more basic than faith.

Opening the book of Hebrews is a bit like stepping into Transporter Room on the starship Enterprise. A few verses are all it takes to beam us suddenly down into an alien world filled with angels, sacrificial purification rites and Melchizedek. There’s very little about Hebrews that looks, sounds or feels familiar to 21st-century people, all of which makes dealing with this letter a challenge (and explains why so many of us avoid it).