In the Lectionary

I cherish the vision of what could have been a great moment in American poetry. One day my American literature professor told our class about Emily Dickinson, the quiet and reclusive woman who was satisfied to live in a circumscribed world in Amherst, Massachusetts.

It's not like people in Jeremiah's day were asking God for a new covenant.

“Mom! Jesus says that rich people don’t go to heaven!” “We are not rich. Go back to bed.”

The Roman custom of lifting a newborn infant probably underlies Jesus’s symbolic action in Mark 9.

If we are to get past our discomfort with the name-calling, we will have to look more closely and note what Jesus does with the word dog.

Proverbs 9 seems to suggest that someone might be tempted to bypass wisdom’s feast and try to survive on the thin gruel of folly, or information.

In the face of existential threat, God comes with the grace which is the courage to be.