14th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, RCL)

Throughout scripture, human bodies are not an obstacle to righteousness; they are its location.

Peter Hooten considers the concept in relationship to the theologian’s entire body of work.

We could see Paul’s caveats about his ecstatic experiences as false humility. But then he shows solidarity with the human condition.

Whatever else David is, he is recognizably human and not a fairy-tale king.

In times like these, we need heaven.

Is this passage more than a cautionary tale about the tendency to stuff a suitcase to the gills?

The final lesson in Discipleship 101: learning to fall

As a young minister in my early 20s, I was often admonished by the senior ministers to keep a guarded distance from laypeople. To get too close, they would say, is to become too familiar with a resulting loss of one's ministerial authority. They thought authority was protected by distance and diminished by relationships.

As Jesus prepares to send the Twelve, his experience of failure seems to color his instructions.

My Asperger's and my ministry

Once I finished working with this week’s gospel text, I went back into my files to see how many times I’ve managed to preach on it in my seven circuits through the lectionary. I found that I’ve missed it more often than not—no surprise there, as it falls at a convenient time of year for that. And when I have preached on it, the sermon has always been on one half of the text or the other—either on the scene in the Nazareth synagogue or on the sending of the disciples. I have never written a sermon that dealt with both stories.

The villagers of Nazareth knew Jesus, and they thought him to be nothing special.

Rejection has been the traveling companion of the gospel from the beginning.

The closest I get to the kind of religious experience the apostle Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 12 is the occasional Sunday when the music and the congregation merge in worship that is unrestrained praise. I especially enjoy communion, since the Eucharist itself is designed to anticipate heaven. With our sins confessed and forgiven, peace made and prayers prayed, we experience an unusual unity with God and with each other. It’s a taste of paradise.

Even with Paul's wish to serve, even with his good motives, the Lord does not answer his prayer as he asked or expected.