25th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, RCL)

In meditating on the words of scripture, I discover a Word who meditates on me.

Child advocate R. L. Stollar seeks to help people read the Bible in ways that protect and honor children.

If so, what did he mean?

Trees symbolize a holy channel that faithfully stewards the power of God into the world.

What does it mean to fear the Lord?

Does a good woman give and give and give without thought to her own well-being?

The monarchy, celebrity, and true greatness

Mystics experience the holy—an experience that enlarges their interest in their fellow humans.

Perhaps the disciples have been captivated by the kind of power embodied by Augustus and Herod.

Efforts to avoid the term proof are mistaken—both as a reading of Aquinas and as a broader claim about whether God exists.

Our proclivity for greatness is rather embarrassing, isn’t it? No wonder the disciples keep their mouths shut when Jesus inquires about the topic of their conversation on the road. We want it, and we want it big time—recognition, sway, importance—but we also get that we shouldn’t admit this out loud.

This week’s Gospel may be the second Passion prediction, but being told that Jesus will be killed is no easier on the second hearing. Maybe the disciples don’t ask questions because they’re afraid it could be true.

For there to be a heresy about the cross, there would have to be an orthodoxy about it. Michael Gorman argues that contentions over how Jesus saves lead to an inadequate grasp of what the Passion means and does.

Sometimes preaching in a lectionary church is like being Philip in Acts 8—the Spirit plucks us up and drops us where ever she darn well pleases. It is necessarily this way, certainly.  Between the thematic requirements of the seasons of the church year and the sheer length of the four Gospels spread out over 156 Sundays, there is no way we can read all four in their entirety in three years. So, we skip stuff. Especially in Year B, as we try to mash the shortest Gospel, Mark, together with the other Gospel, John, together in some supposedly coherent way.

The other morning during my run I listened to Krista Tippett’s 2010 interview with Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain.

Proverbs 31 used to be a standard at funerals. That was before we realized that womanly virtue meant more than giving a husband bragging rites in the city gates. I use to think it my pastoral duty to root out both masculine and feminine stereotypes in liturgy, hymnody and scripture. Now I’m not so sure.

Enough water has passed under the bridge to allow us to take a second look at the virtuous woman of Proverbs 31.