Third Sunday of Advent (Year C, RCL)

His followers realized there was no quick exit from the discomfort of his words.

It’s hard to take Paul’s admonition seriously these days.

The first step of repentance is telling the truth about ourselves.

It's a great question to ask people. But not this person.

“If we can’t afford two boxes,” my grandmother said, “we can’t afford one.”

Most social problems are rooted in the failure of the strong to be gentle with others.

What does true joy require of us?

The main purpose of prayer is to enjoy God.

God loves everything that God made, and God loves you especially, and the only way you can avoid that love is by deliberately removing yourself from it. That is how I want to preach this Gospel on Advent 3. John the Baptist tells us that we can, in fact, separate ourselves from love, and describes some of the ways how.

In response to John’s insistence that the ax is at the root of the tree, poised to cut down trees that don’t bear good fruit, three groups ask, “If that’s so, how then shall we live?”

The tension between the joy of the first three readings and the judgment of the Baptizer’s proclamation is theologically instructive. It presses us to hold the two together.

Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote, “The human spirit is incapable of ridding itself of an abiding sense of homelessness.” It is as if we never feel quite at home anywhere but are always seeking that sweet place. We yearn for the day when the distance between time and eternity will be finally and fully bridged; until then, we understand exile.