How do you deal with those you find difficult to love? “‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ … ‘You shall love your neighbor as…
Many sternly ordered Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus, to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Many tried to hush him up, but he yelled even louder. Throughout history, the lame and the blind who have been obliged to beg for their food have sought to benefit…
In his book Jesus Among Other Gods, Ravi Zacharias relays a story that Sir Isaac Newton, the great scientist and mathematician, had a dog that he loved very much. Wherever Newton went, the dog went with him. One time he had worked for months on a theory about the nature of the universe, working late…
Today’s Gospel reading is radical: a rich, young man asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” In response, Jesus tells him that he is lacking in one thing, and instructs him to go and sell what he has and give to the poor. I mean, this is a pretty radical thing to…
Every once in a while, I enjoy preaching a sermon that isn’t me talking through how I view the readings, but rather about asking questions that I found myself asking after the readings. These sermons are intentionally structured to ask a question and then to provide some time to give you an opportunity to ponder…
I wanted to start today with this story: Jesus and Satan were having an on-going argument about who was better on the computer. They had been going at it for days, and frankly God was tired of hearing all the bickering. Finally fed up, God said, “That’s it. I have had enough. I am going…
The other day when Brian and I picked up Zak from after school care, I was reminiscing back to grade school. Zak’s class was marching from the play room back to the classroom, and one of his classmates got picked to be the line leader. I was thinking about how in second grade, my class…
Wisdom is at the heart of today’s readings. Wisdom – the great teacher of humankind whose witness is present not only in the words of a teacher, but also in the ordered patterns of the universe and our planet – is often in conflict and contrasted to worldly values. We are challenged to align ourselves…
In our Gospel reading today, Jesus cures a deaf mute and arouses astonishment in the crowd. We Christians tend to think that the healing of people was the main goal in Jesus’ life. But after this Sunday there are only four more healings by Jesus in Mark’s Gospel. Why? Earlier (in the first seven chapters)…
The fornicators among us are surely disturbed by the words of Jesus today. So are the greedy among us. The same might be said for liars, adulterers, thieves, killers, the licentious, the envious, the arrogant. I contemplated scrapping talking about the Gospel today and thought about talking about love. Or how we need to give…
After seeing the second reading for today, I was tempted to preach exclusively on it. You see, while taking the General Ordination Examination to become a priest, the question that was posed to me about the canonical area of “The Holy Scriptures” instructed us to respond to the text of the second reading in an…
The letter to the Ephesians is written to a new, young church community that is trying to figure out how to live out their faith together. They are working to determine how to be distinctly different from the wider community around them, and to fit that into how they lived before they met Christ. They…
