In the Gospel reading for the Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time from Luke 14 1 7-14 Jesus speaks two parables The first deals with honor embarrassment humility and exaltation In the NRSV the first parable is as follows ldquo when he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor he

When you write on the Bible one of the things that you should avoid if you can is flippancy People tend to get riled up when you are flippant about Scripture because flippancy gone bad comes off more as ldquo disrespectful rdquo than ldquo light and airy rdquo As a result the flippant wr

As I return from a summer hiatus to write for The Good Word it occurs to me that one of the questions that nbsp we should consider this year is ldquo what is the Bible rdquo Most of us think we know what we are talking about but it can be amazing as to how different our presuppositions actually

Do you ever wish nbsp that you were done learning That instead of being tested life was easy leisurely Years ago when still a teenager I wanted to start a religion called ldquo Incidental Meditation rdquo or ldquo I M rdquo for short At the heart of the religion was that the teachings wo

How to read to preach on these familiar stories related to each other at the thematic level as the Lectionary is wont to do The synoptic gospels draw heavily on the Elijah Elisha stories sometimes to characterize John the Baptist and Jesus and more often Jesus and his disciples It appears in th

At first glance these first and Gospel readings seem well-matched even easy David and Simon have mis-stepped seriously in terms of what they supposed sincerely or not was acceptable behavior specifically here in the treatment of women Each is admonished strongly by a powerful prophet-like spe