Dear Friends, It’s been a while since I’ve posted, I know. It’s been hard to be away from you all, but my current call at Mount Olivet Lutheran Church (Mpls) — which has been the absolute delight and privilege of my career — has made it hard to find the time to keep up the weekly discipline of writing on the upcoming RCL selections (particularly as we’ve moved to a narrative lectionary pattern — more on that, perhaps, in a later post). But… given what we’re all facing together, and because I am not spending quite as much time commuting(!), I thought I would try to resume that...

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...

Mark 5:21-43 Dear Partner in Preaching, Mark doesn’t begin these two inter-connected stories by saying, “The kingdom of God is like…”, but he might have. Indeed, compared with his Synoptic cousins, Mark doesn’t share all that many of Jesus’ parables (and most of the few he does we’ve already touched on), and yet weaving together of these two stories feels rather parabolic, as it offers one picture of Jesus’ ministry and God’s reign that we preachers might “throw alongside” (the literal meaning of παραβολή) the picture of our life in the world. Central to this parable is the vulnerability of the characters and,...

A quick note: I’ll be reflecting on the Gospel appointed for All Saints’ Sunday but will put links here to a commentary and reflection I’ve written on Luke 20:27-28 (Pentecost 25 C) below. Luke 6:20-31 Dear Partner in Preaching, There is a reason that Luke describes Jesus preaching his most famous sermon from a plain rather than a mountain. Have you ever noticed that? That what we routinely call the “Sermon on the Mount” isn’t delivered from a mountain in Luke’s Gospel? That is what happens in Matthew’s story, but not Luke’s. Jesus does indeed go up a mountain in Luke’s account, but it is in order to pray, and after a...

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...