Today’s gospel lesson is part of Jesus’ teaching about our life together in community, how it is that we are to live and love within the Christian community, especially when things go wrong. And because we are talking about human beings living in community, we can be fairly sure that things will go wrong. Our…

It is a hard job being religious. Perhaps we feel this the more when we compare our lives with those of the saints. Of course we have our excuses. The world was less complicated in their days. People had time to pray seven times a day, like the psalmist. We move from that excuse to…

It is not that God’s Church has a Mission, but that God’s Mission has a Church. It is Peter’s day – the day he is renamed by Jesus. No longer Simon, but Peter. Which in the New Testament Greek makes for a kind of pun – for the word for “rock” is petra, while Peter is Petros. Petros is petra –…

Have you ever felt as desperate as the Caananite woman in today’s gospel? Emotions seem to explode from us when we’re desperate. We’ve all seen pictures on the television of women and men wailing with grief over their children slaughtered in a bomb attack in the Middle East. They often collapse in unbearable pain over…

If you ever decide to write a book about the gospels, here’s an idea for you. You might want to tackle the central role of the Sea of Galilee in the narrative of Jesus’ ministry. A great freshwater lake or inland sea about a third the size of Lake Tahoe on the California-Nevada border, it…

[NOTE TO READER: The Greek word “esplahnisthē” in the fifth paragraph is pronounced “Es-plah-NEES-thee.”] Jesus’ cousin, the one who went before him to open the way, is dead. Both John and Jesus had started their brief ministries as courageous prophets, proclaiming God’s justice, calling people to repentance, inviting them to find their way to God….

Today let’s picture the world as an ungainly, promising mass of dough. In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The comedian comes out on stage, and starts his routine. In a rapid-fire monologue, he serves up jokes. His timing is masterful, and the one-liners burst forth in succession, with precision, so that…

In a classic strip of the famed “Peanuts” newspaper cartoon, Lucy explains to her little brother Linus about the existence of good and evil. She tells him that he, like others, have inside these two forces. Linus looks at his stomach with a distressed look on his face and declares, “I can feel them in…

Southern California is a maze of concrete freeways: two lanes, four lanes, eight lanes, high-occupancy vehicle lanes, special-use lanes, bus lanes, peak-hour reversible-direction lanes, and more. A literal maze of concrete interconnecting over 8,000 square miles. Southern California drivers fear the radio announcement that a sig alert has been issued on their route. A “sig…