Luke 15:1-10 Dear Partner in Preaching, It’s September, and your parish life, like mine, is probably full to overflowing with the start of a new program year, stewardship events, planning for the fall and winter, looking ahead to planning a budget and a mission rationale to accompany it, and more. It’s so easy to get caught up in all these important, even vital, activities of church leadership and, perhaps, to forget, or at least lose track of, the reason for all the work: to share the news that God loves us more than we can imagine. Fortunately, this week we have before us these unbelievably brief and evocative and beautiful...

Luke 12:32-40 Dear Partner in Preaching, It’s late in the week, and I’m again pressed for time, so I will offer just a few thoughts on this Sunday’s passage. First and foremost: Jesus’ words “Do not be afraid, little flock,” seem like a tall order just now. Global warming. Racial divides. Instability in governments around the globe. Trade wars and rumors of wars. Lots to fear, it would seem, made worse by the fact that there are lots of people eager to play upon our fears and lots of channels for them to do so through. And then come the commands: Sell your possessions. Give alms. Store your treasure in heaven. Be...

Luke 10:38-42 Dear Partner in Preaching, What if their names were Matt and Marty, rather than Mary and Martha? I’m talking, of course, about the two characters interacting with Jesus in this week’s Gospel reading. Because they are two women, and because they seem – at least momentarily – at odds with each other, and because Jesus appears to take a side, we have for centuries tried to read this story as about discipleship and yet somehow regularly made it about women’s roles. Women’s roles in the church, in leadership, in society, and beyond. Goodness, but the pull of this interpretation is so strong that it has escaped...

Luke 10:25-37 Dear Partner in Preaching, I’ll admit that this has never been my favorite parable (and that I feel no small measure of guilt about that). Maybe it’s because this is one of those passages that is so well known, so famous, everyone already thinks they know what it means and so it’s hard to find a fresh angle. Or maybe it’s the way this parable has leapt off the pages of the Bible and into popular culture – think of the laws after Princess Diana’s death or the final episode of Seinfeld referencing the same – which makes it a surprisingly complicated passage to preach. Or maybe it’s because it has...

Luke 10:1-11, 16-20 Dear Partner in Preaching, Not too long ago, while preparing a sermon, I was reminded of linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin’s book How to Do Things With Words, where he expresses the conviction that you know the meaning of a word or sentence not by what it says (our usual assumption), but by why what it does, by what impact it has on you. For instance, imagine that I say, “The door is open.” Is that simply a statement of fact? Maybe. But what if you had just asked a question about why it was so warm inside even though the air-conditioning was on, and I said, “The door is open.” Then I’m not simply...

Luke 9:51-62 Dear Partner in Preaching, I find this such a particularly hard passage to preach because I am so incredibly disappointed, shocked, and confused by the violent instinct of James and John. It’s easy to skip over the first half of this passage in a hurry to get to the easier moralism of “stop letting things get in the way of following Jesus.” But the details are worth tarrying over: Jesus has set his face for Jerusalem and so will let nothing deter him from embracing the cross that awaits him there. He travels through a portion of Samaria and the residents of a Samaritan village don’t receive him because “his face...

Luke 8:26-39 Dear Partner in Preaching My apologies for the long “radio-silence.” While Holy Week and Easter are often the crunch times in ministry, followed by a bit of a respite, that has not been my experience this year. Board meetings and trips and baptisms and funerals and graduations all the things that make up congregational life have kept me running and made it very challenging to write… even late into the week. And I’m not sure when or if that will change, so I will continue to write when I’m able, but simply can’t promise that my reflections will be as regular as before. None of this, I want to be clear, should...

Luke 22:14-23:56 Dear Partner in Preaching, Sometimes when you read a familiar passage, you wonder just what you’ll preach on this time, and sometimes – and oh, how nice it is when this happens! – sometimes something entirely new jumps out at you. That’s what happened to me this week at the prompting of one of the readers of this column. Earlier this week, one of you wrote to me and observed that in Luke’s version of the Passion, Peter denies Jesus three times and Pilate proclaims his innocence three times. The preacher writing asked if this was significant. And, to tell you the truth, I’d never noticed that before....

Luke 15: 1-2, 11-32 So I’m curious, dear Partner in Preaching, why doesn’t Luke mention repentance in this story? I mean, he does in the first two “lost” parables preceding it. And it’s not like repentance doesn’t appear other places in the Third Gospel as well (like just last week). Indeed, last week’s reading and this week’s were both likely chosen by the RCL folks to fall in Lent precisely because their theme is so transparently about repentance. But that word doesn’t appear in this week’s story. Why? Maybe it’s because the theme has already been so well established via the first two...

Luke 13:1-9 Dear Partner in Preaching, Theodicy is a rabbit hole. And we don’t have to go down it. Yeah, that’s pretty much all I have this week. Okay, a word or two of explanation. First, this passage names questions pretty much everyone who thinks about God eventually asks. Why do bad things happen to good people? Does God cause calamity? Is tragedy – whether on the small scale or large – punishment for sin? These are questions we ask, I think, because tragedy and calamity – whether caused by nature, like the devastation of we are witnessing in Mozambique, or caused by humans, like the murders at the mosque in...