No, this is not a long dissertation on scripture and its various uses, though I love to talk about that. For many, the purpose of scripture is to keep us on a doctrinally correct path. It tells us the things we are supposed to believe. Simply believing correctly is what’s important. For me, however, a…
My wife wrote her devotional today from the lectionary texts (After Pentecost 23C). I note that the post number is 6000, and though I know that number isn’t actually the number of posts (revisions run the number up), that’s still a lot of devotionals! The conclusion: God truly pours out in great extravagance upon His…
I want to focus on just one line of text. In 1 Kings 3:5, God tells Solomon to ask God what God should give Solomon. It’s a simple enough question. Most of us remember the answer. Solomon wants wisdom. God decides to give him wisdom and lots of riches as well. As I reflect on…
The gospel for Proper 14B is John 6:35, 41-51. This isn’t an exposition of that passage, but something that passage brought back to my mind. Jesus starts with the bread metaphor. Now for many of us, comparing spiritual food to bread comes quite naturally. We’ve read this in the gospel many times, and we’ve heard…
This is my second thought today from John 6:24-35, the gospel passage from Proper 13B. It’s a tightly packed passage! In verses 28-29 Jesus says: 28They said to him, “What do we need to do to perform God’s works?” 29Jesus answered, “This is God’s work: That you put your trust [or believe] in the one…
This is a seemingly simple story. The elders of Israel finally recognize David as king after a long time of rebellion and civil war. All come together and make a covenant with David and he becomes their king. But if you think back in the story, you may recall that in 1 Samuel 16, the…
Scripture: Acts 10:44-48 OK, for those who might be unacquainted with the lectionary, let me note that the Acts passage takes the place of the standard Old Testament reading this week. To keep things together, I therefore categorize it as Old Testament. Acts is in the New Testament, obviously! How hard is it to lead…
Scripture: 1 John 4:7-21 While I confess to be a love teacher, I am often puzzled by the way Christians speak about love as though it is the easier way. It is as though they might try following some rules, but that would be too hard, so they’ll try love instead. But a love that…
I talk about this quite a bit (here, for example), but I don’t think it can be emphasized enough. It’s very difficult to get people to listen to your theology, your theories about how God works. It’s much easier to get them to listen–and understand–when they hear your story. Psalm 107 from this week’s lectionary…
There are so many ideas that come from reading 1 Corinthians 1:18-25. The worst is the notion that many foolish human notions are actually divine wisdom. Paul doesn’t tell us any such thing. Certainly human wisdom falls far short of God’s wisdom, and we may have some very foolish ideas that we mistake for wisdom,…
