Mark 1:4-11 Dear Partner in Preaching, I’m sorry for the late post. It’s been a week, as I know it has been for you. So… very briefly, just a couple of thoughts for Sunday. I wonder how our folks will hear the story of Jesus’ baptism. In particular, I wonder if it will occur to them what an odd thing it is that Jesus is getting baptized. As you’ll remember, this was a huge question and challenge, and even a problem, in the early church. Why, after all, does the sinless Son of God need a baptism for forgiveness? These stories were among the verses Arius and his followers used to show that Jesus wasn’t the “truly God”...

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 Dear Partner in Preaching, You may remember from a New Testament class in seminary that Jesus’ baptism – which we typically take for granted as part of the biblical story and, for that matter, the church year – was actually quite scandalous. You can appreciate the logic. If baptism is for the remission of sin… and we confess Jesus was sinless… then why was Jesus baptized? Or, worse, are we contradicting ourselves: is baptism not about forgiveness, or was Jesus not sinless? That ambivalence, combined with a similar ambivalence about the character of John the Baptist (he also had disciples and was a...

Mark 1:9-15 Dear Partner in Preaching, There is a whole lot going on in this Sunday’s Gospel reading from Mark. That may be easy to miss, because we’ve touched on various parts of Mark’s first chapters several times already in Advent and Epiphany. But where Matthew and Luke, by contrast, give distinct and rich descriptions of Jesus’ baptism, his temptation, and the beginning of his ministry, Mark compresses all these events into just a few short verses. And while we may simply assume this is Mark’s Dragnet-like style – “Just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts.” – I think there may be more at work. Perhaps, that is, baptism,...

Mark 1:4-11 Dear Partner in Preaching, I don’t know about you, but from time to time – okay, so maybe a little more often than from time to time – I find myself wondering whether my preaching makes a difference. That’s not to say I doubt that it should make a difference – we’re talking about proclaiming the Gospel, after all! – but whether it actually does. On a Sunday like this, that question feels both more persistent and more urgent. It is, after all, one of those “minor” feasts, the Baptism of our Lord, and I can’t help but wonder how many people understand why Jesus’ baptism matters. Or why Jesus was baptized in...

Matthew 4:1-11 Dear Partner in Preaching, I’m going to boil the heart of this passage down into one, probably pretty familiar, saying: You only know who you are when you realize whose you are. I usually mention this in terms of Baptism, and I’ll get there in this passage, I promise. But for now, I want to reference some research I read a long time ago (and so can’t remember the source, though I suspect it might be Seth Godin’s Tribes). Essentially, it contended that while we typically think of identity as something we forge on our own, most of our sense of ourselves comes from the community we belong to, our family of origin, and the...