Dear Partner in Preaching, Upon sitting down to write this letter to you, I quickly reviewed the three earlier times I’ve written on this passage (once on these pages, once in a Dear Working Preacher column, and once by way of commentary for Working Preacher) and realized… that they same more or less the same thing! (Less you miss this, take it as a warning about reviewing old sermons, too! 🙂 ) I suppose that’s not terrible and, for what it’s worth, I’ll still stand by my sense of Luke’s audacious testimony that moves from history to confession. But it does remind me that there’s only so much one can say about any given...

I love John’s audacity. I know, I know, I said the same thing about Luke just a few weeks ago, but hear me out. Luke is an audacious historian; John is an audacious author and theologian. Take, for instance, how he begins his Gospel: “In the beginning….” Sound familiar? Of course it does. These are the opening words of Genesis: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth….” (1:1). So think about that for a moment. John is writing his story of Jesus and decides to start by quoting the beginning of Genesis or, really, the whole Bible. It would be kind of like if I wanted to write a novel and decided to begin,...