In the Lectionary

Zacchaeus's daily life as a tax collector was reduced to the symptoms of his society's sickness.

Nations as well as individuals need to look in the moral mirror in order to stop deceiving ourselves.

Maybe the parable of the persistent widow isn't about God. Maybe it's about us.

When I read this week's Gospel, I remember two lepers I saw at a train station in India—how alone they were.

I'm more than a bit smitten with the image of rekindling the gift of God within us.

Luke's story of the rich man and Lazarus is full of vivid details. Which makes you cringe the most?

What is Jesus thinking when he tells the parable of the dishonest steward?

James calls Abraham a “friend of God.” In this week’s reading from Exodus, Moses presumes upon a similar divine friendship to offer God advice.

In this week’s Gospel text, the piercing hyperbole about family and discipleship normally receives top billing homiletically. However, I am newly struck by Jesus’ words regarding building a tower.

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 unnamed woman’s healing in this week’s Gospel reading is a story of expansion, revelation, vision widened by grace. There’s more to the story, however.

Fire is a dangerous image for Jesus to use, even if he doesn’t mean it literally. What kind of God would bring fire to the earth?

Hope is the content of faith. Hope is the adopted son, the grafted inheritor. If there are to be, as with Abraham’s descendants, innumerable stars and grains of sands, it will be through this boy.

Paul says the hidden life is a moral one, putting off vices like a set of dirty old clothes.

What is the point of prayer? The question is writ large in the texts from both the Hebrew scripture and the Gospel for this Sunday. The terrain is fraught with places to trip and fall.

God’s experience of hospitality—in the mysterious travelers and in the person of Jesus—inspires us to think beyond an Abraham-vs.-Sarah or Martha-vs.-Mary divide.

How do we respond to the issues that trouble people deeply? Jesus and the lawyer have a proper debate, but the lawyer continues to wrestle and cannot let go.

Jesus sends his disciples out “like lambs in the midst of wolves.” We live in a time when intimacy is erased, privacy laughable, rhetoric rude and rusty. The notion of going out as lambs to wolves is apt, even if the wolves and lambs may be interchangeable.

Jesus setting his face to Jerusalem marks a shift: the text mentions it three times. There is a boldness and immovable attention to the assignment.

Many people are bound. Some don’t even know it. The difference between being free and being bound is at the center of our Gospel text this week.