What does it mean to welcome others in Jesus’ Name? Two powerful images confront the reader and student of today’s Gospel: one is our desire (unchanged through the ages) to be first and to be right; and the second is our reluctance to enter fully into the terror and sadness of the incarnation. The passages…

There seem to be some people who just can’t stop talking. Others hardly say a word. Perhaps the experts can dig into the psyches of such people and clue us in as to why Bert blithers on, interrupts, and rarely listens, and Sheila occasionally grunts but that is all! Then there are those who pride…

Sometimes when we hear the Bible in our own language, it’s helpful to translate it yet again into our time and place. Let’s do that today. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The conversation we heard about in the Gospel that was just read with its references to religious hand washing…

Following God is a difficult thing. God requires things of us. The ancient Israelites of today’s lesson are an illustration. Much of the history of Israel, at least that part that’s shown to us in the Old Testament, is a constant saga of the people falling away from following the Lord. Israel had a series…

It has been said that if advice giving worked, we wouldn’t need therapists or marriage counselors. Pastoral advice from one’s favorite member of the clergy would be almost irrelevant, too. Just think of the great insights you’ve given your family and/or friends when they’ve gotten in a jam, been misunderstood, or have just, plain, messed…

Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from…

This is not how you learned Christ! We are never satisfied. This is what the Exodus stories reveal over and over again. We are never satisfied. What is it that we want? We long to return from exile, but then we wish we had stayed in Egypt, “when we sat by the fleshpots and ate…

Last Sunday, with the story of the feeding of the 5,000, we started a sort of Gospel mini-series. That story of Jesus providing food for the crowd was full of images of both the Last Supper and of the Eucharist; in fact, it was really about those things. The Gospel today — the account of…

The world into which Saul of Tarsus was born was a world in which people were divided into two camps: the Jews — that is, the chosen people of God, the ones to whom God had been revealed, the ones to whom all the promises of Hebrew Scripture had been made — and the Gentiles…