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...

Dear Partner in Preaching, Hey – I know it hardly helps to get these reflections so late in the week. And I apologize. My work at LTSP, and particularly our efforts to unify the Philadelphia and Gettysburg seminaries, has been pretty much all consuming of late and it’s getting harder to find time to write. Again, my apologies. I’ll try to do better. In the meantime, I’ll keep this week’s reflection relatively short. So….what strikes me most about this story is not the miracle itself. This is Jesus we’re talking about after all. But rather the reaction of the crowds. Luke tells us that after Jesus gave life back to the widow’s...