John 1:6-8, 19-28 Dear Partner in Preaching No complaints this week about the RCL Advent readings. Yes, it’s week two of an adult John the Baptist (meant to orient us to John’s role as the forerunner of Jesus and fulfillment of messianic expectation). Yes, this will make almost no sense to our folks absent our explanations. Yes, they could have chosen a story from Luke 1 about Elizabeth’s conception of the child John and made the same point. Yes, this jumping around in timelines for theological purposes was probably helpful when folks really knew their Bible but today probably only makes it harder for folks to learn the biblical...

John 20:19-31 Dear Partner in Preaching, Have you ever noticed how long it takes John to get around to telling us what he’s up to? John the Fourth Evangelist, that is. Twenty-some chapters and finally he comes clean. Sort of. So here’s what I mean. There are two elements of this week’s very familiar story – one of the few in Scripture that is read in each cycle of our lectionary – that grabbed my attention. The first is what I’d call the culmination and climax of the “plot dynamic” of John; that is, how John arranges the scenes of the story he tells together and to what end. In short, after introducing us to Jesus...

Don’t worry, if you’re not familiar with the term “digital pluralism” you’re not behind the times, out of touch, or manifestly uncultured. Trust me, I should know, as I made this term up! 🙂 What I mean by talking of digital pluralism is to recognize that we live in an era when multiple stories, worldviews, traditions, convictions, and versions of reality now circulate, and even compete, with each other largely because of the advent of digital communication. Think about it in terms of this analogy: a generation ago we had “the Big Three” in television which, truth be told, mostly featured all the...

Dear Partner in Preaching, Oddly enough, there’s a scene from AMC’s record-breaking TV program The Walking Dead that popped into my head when reading this passage. No, no one turns brilliantly white. And there are no offers to build three booths. Rather, it’s a simple exchange between Rick Grimes, the sheriff who leads a band of survivors through a zombie-infested landscape and Herschel Greene, an older man who functions as something of a father-figure and mentor to Rick. They are discussing the horrors of their post-apocalyptic world when Herschel affirms that he still believes there is a plan to all this, that God has something in...

Yesterday I posted a video about the devastating effect media messages about beauty can have on all of us, but particularly our youth. Part of the challenge, as I suggested yesterday, is that our kids are so media-saturated – far more than they are media-savvy – that it’s difficult to provide a filter. Which means that we need to counter the voices of the culture that regularly seek to make them feel inadequate with messages about their inherent worth and dignity. And this, when you think of it for even a few seconds, is something that should come naturally to us. We proclaim, after all, that we and all people are children of God,...