Mark 10:2-16 Dear Partner in Preaching, Sometimes the issue isn’t really the issue. Do you know what I mean? Someone comes to you with an issue – perhaps a criticism of something going on in the parish or, more personally, of something you’ve done – but the real issue isn’t that at all, but rather that that person wasn’t invited to join the committee working on that project… or wasn’t visited in the hospital (even though they didn’t let anyone know they were in the hospital!)… or is experiencing a rupture in an important relationship… or just received a terrifying diagnosis and can hardly make sense of it. And sometimes...

Dear Partner in Preaching, Let me suggest a totally different way to approach this text. I’ve written it on it from the perspective of how Mark’s “divorce text” relates to questions of marriage before, and there are certainly excellent commentaries available on this theme. But what strikes me this time around is that perhaps we don’t need to read this as addressed to individuals but rather as something descriptive of, and helpful to, a community. Bear with me a moment while I explain. When this passage is read at church, we tend to hear it in an intensely personal way. This is particularly true, of course, if you have gone through...