At the time Matthew’s Gospel was being written, in the 80s of the first century, the city of Antioch in Syria had become the third most important city in the nascent Roman Empire. But Antioch was sitting on top of a geological fault-line that nobody understood in those days, and it had repeatedly suffered from…

The Old Testament lesson for today is an emphatic repetition of an earlier passage in Deuteronomy that is based on the Shema, the great trumpet call in Hebrew of, “Hear o Israel,” followed by the commandment to a belief in the One God. The words that must be obeyed are: “The Lord is our God,…

A recent bestseller posed the notion that everything one needs to know is learned in kindergarten. We can carry that a step farther and say that everything one needs to know about God can be learned from kindergarteners or from those a few years before or after that age level. Jesus said that we have…