Matthew 22:1-14 Dear Partner in Preaching, This may just be my least favorite parable in my least favorite Gospel. (And before you say anything, I know a good working preacher doesn’t play favorites. Well, maybe when it comes to parables, but not Gospels.) Regardless, this parable seems just plain nasty. Not so much because it’s difficult to interpret – it is, to some degree, though mostly, I think, because we don’t like what it says. But rather because of the indiscriminate violence in the passage. What are we to make of it? To get at that question, I’m going to try to summarize what seem to me to be the three main...

Matthew 18:21-35 Dear Partner in Preaching, I find sermons on forgiveness challenging. Not because I don’t think forgiveness is important. It is central not just to our life of faith but also, I’d argue, our life together in this world. Absent forgiveness, how could we possibly stay in relationship with each other? Forgiveness isn’t something that only restores, even frees, the one forgiven. Forgiveness also restores and frees the one who forgives. Forgiveness creates possibility, keeps the future open, offers paths forward formerly not imaginable, and breaks the cosmic law of relentless cause-and-effect to create something new....

Luke 16:19-31 A brief note: Pardon sharing this one again, Dear Partner. Time is/has been/will be short, and I’ve heard from a few of you that it’s hard to find earlier pieces, so I’ll repost the column of three years ago. For what it’s worth, I find this angle even more compelling three years later and back in the parish. I hope it’s helpful, and thank you for your good and faithful work! Dear Partner in Preaching, Do you ever wonder if Luke had ever heard about justification by grace? I mean, tradition tells us that he was a traveling companion of the Apostle Paul’s but, if so, it’s hard to know just how...

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...

Matthew 18:21-35 Dear Partner in Preaching, I have come to love this passage. The operative words, however, are “have come,” because I didn’t always. And I the reasons I didn’t always love this passage, but now do, are intimately tied together. My difficulty with the passage has quite simply been that forgiveness can be so exceptionally difficult, and never more so than when it commanded. I don’t mean the occasional moment of warm-hearted forgiveness, overlooking someone’s minor slight when you feel magnanimous; nor do I mean the spontaneous forgiveness you feel when someone is genuinely contrite over some accidental – and...