I don’t know if this is as popular an act as it used to be, but I’m sure you’ve all seen someone who gets up in front of a crowd of people and at least pretends to be able to read people’s minds. They pick a volunteer out of the audience, and then the mind-reader, who supposedly has never seen this person before, tells him or her all sorts of things that it would be impossible for a stranger to know. Sometime it’s pretty vague — for example, the mind-reader says that the volunteer has a troubled relationship. And of course that’s an easy one — who doesn’t have at…

Jesus faced a problem in his ministry that he never really solved. If you had no credentials to speak of, but you had a message that people were going to find difficult, how would you convince people to listen? Sometimes what happened was what happened in today’s gospel. This woman at the well was enormously impressed with Jesus’ ability to tell her something about her past, to know without being told that she’d had five husbands. That got her attention, the mind-reading, and ultimately that seems to be the message that she runs off eager to tell her fellow townspeople. “Come see a man who told me everything I ever…

Maybe you had your attention gripped last weekend by the same picture I saw on the front page of the Saturday New York Times. Those of you who were born in the past 25 years or so might not have even known the man in the picture. And in fact, even if he had been a familiar face to you years ago, as he was for me, time has been very hard on him, and you might not have recognized him. It was George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama and presidential candidate, and more notably even than that, one of the most visible opponents of the movement towards civil…