Dear Partner in Preaching, It really doesn’t have to be bread, power, or safety. Temptations, I mean. In today’s reading the devil tries to seduce Jesus with the promise of bread when he’s hungry, the glory and power of all the world’s leaders, and the promise of rescue paired with the suggestion that God is not sufficient to keep Jesus safe. And all Jesus has to do in return is worship Satan. So in this scene, it’s bread, power, and safety. But it could be something else. Which is the key to preaching this story, I think. Because the point isn’t the specific temptations, but rather the underlying nature of temptation itself. In...

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,...

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...