Following God is a difficult thing. God requires things of us. The ancient Israelites of today’s lesson are an illustration. Much of the history of Israel, at least that part that’s shown to us in the Old Testament, is a constant saga of the people falling away from following the Lord. Israel had a series…

It has been said that if advice giving worked, we wouldn’t need therapists or marriage counselors. Pastoral advice from one’s favorite member of the clergy would be almost irrelevant, too. Just think of the great insights you’ve given your family and/or friends when they’ve gotten in a jam, been misunderstood, or have just, plain, messed…

Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from…

This is not how you learned Christ! We are never satisfied. This is what the Exodus stories reveal over and over again. We are never satisfied. What is it that we want? We long to return from exile, but then we wish we had stayed in Egypt, “when we sat by the fleshpots and ate…

Last Sunday, with the story of the feeding of the 5,000, we started a sort of Gospel mini-series. That story of Jesus providing food for the crowd was full of images of both the Last Supper and of the Eucharist; in fact, it was really about those things. The Gospel today — the account of…

The world into which Saul of Tarsus was born was a world in which people were divided into two camps: the Jews — that is, the chosen people of God, the ones to whom God had been revealed, the ones to whom all the promises of Hebrew Scripture had been made — and the Gentiles…

People don’t like to hear bad news. That’s so obvious it almost seems funny to say it. Bad news is depressing. It’s the sort of thing we want to avoid if we can. In the Broadway show The Wiz one of the characters sings a song whose title is “Don’t bring me no bad news.”…

Was your experience of adolescence something like this? The girls or boys in the town or neighboring high school always seemed better looking than the familiar ones. And if you were to ask the teens in those near-by places their experience, they would have said the boys and girls in your school or town were…

“He strictly ordered them that no one should know this….” What a peculiar way to end a miracle. After all, this is the sort of thing everybody was looking for; this is the sort of thing that would be great press; and it was the sort of thing that would really make his reputation. But…