So here’s the way God works. God assigned this gospel reading for me to preach on right when I’m in the middle of really finding it hard to forgive someone. I don’t want to give you the details, it’s no one around here, but all I’ll say is that of course I’m in the right. He’s a hard person to love right now, he acts like a jerk, and I’ve really had it with trying to help him out. I’m done. But the consolation for me is that I’m probably not alone. Jesus would not have made forgiveness the center of everything he did if he hadn’t known that lack…
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If someone asked you what Jesus’s story of the prodigal son was all about, you’d probably say that it was about forgiveness, that it’s about God’s willingness to welcome almost anyone back to his heart no matter how far they had left God behind. And of course if you gave that answer you wouldn’t be at all wrong. If we take anything away from this story it’s that image of a son on the way home from far away, and the father running out to welcome him before he even got there. That is the way God is, always more eager to embrace us than we have any reason to…
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Jesus is rarely angry in the gospels. But today is one of the days when he is, and it’s worth looking at exactly why. It starts with the famous passage when Peter is the only one among the disciples, who can answer correctly the question about who Jesus is: he is the messiah, the anointed one, the savior who is going to gather his scattered people together and show them the way to freedom. But then, Peter shows that he doesn’t understand everything about what that means. Jesus decides to say more about where this life of the messiah is going. He says that he won’t be living a long…
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My father had a lot of wonderful qualities, and he passed some of them on to me, I guess. And one of them is the old Benjamin Franklin saying, neither a borrower nor a lender be. He didn’t think you should owe money to anyone, that borrowing money was never a situation you wanted to be in, it made you vulnerable. You should stand on your own. And even though yes, I at one time had a mortgage, I have kind of always tried to live this way, feeling pretty independent, very upright in a way, even if not very adventurous. Maybe your parents brought you up the same way.…
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If you read the report from the September 11 Commission, I can’t blame you if you couldn’t read much more than the first chapter. It’s a very sober narrative of plane flight after plane flight leaving early that morning. The straightforward words make the sheer heartlessness of it all overwhelming. Reading that stayed with me for a few weeks, until the image of evil I was carrying around in my mind was replaced by pictures from the front page of the New York Times. The unforgettable photograph of an Iraqi militant battling Americans in Najaf, standing on the ledge of a window of a Moslem shrine, his face grotesquely distorted…