[RCL] Genesis 12:1-9; Psalm 33:1-12; Romans 4:13-25; Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26 Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy, which is now a movie, if you’re not the book-reading type, tells people that what called him into his work was “getting proximate.” Stevenson works with prisoners who are on death row – work he was introduced to in…

The lectionary for today is filled with so many themes that one is overwhelmed with riches. There is old Abraham, the ancestor of the promise; the tax collector Matthew, Jairus and his dying daughter, and the woman Jesus encounters, as if by accident, on the way to heal Jairus’ sick child. And in the Epistle,…

God beckons us in the most unusual and exciting ways. Slow to anger and quite creative, God challenges us to pay attention to the small things and follow Christ. Whenever God calls us to serve, we are transformed by an experience that strengthens our faith and conviction in the love of Christ. It is in…

We believe that what this Gospel text is telling us is that if we want to be one of Jesus’ friends we must be sinners. In fact, Jesus said, “I did not come to the virtuous, but sinners.” Since most of us are sinners and since most of us sinners don’t really enjoy hanging out…

One of the hallmarks of modern society is a yearning after justice. Or at least we like to hope–or perhaps pretend–that it is. Justice is an ideal that stands over our political systems and it is the standard against which those systems are judged. We pray for justice: “I ask your prayers for peace; for…