Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany (Year 2, NL)

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

According to Josephus, Herod Antipas desperately wanted to be called “king.”

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

Put your ear to the ground. You will not detect a single note of good news in the story of Herod, Herodias, and John.

The final lesson in Discipleship 101: learning to fall

When Jews, Christians, and Muslims gather to celebrate arts and culture, the dividing walls crumble.

When I was baptized at 12, I refused what Baptists call “the right hand of fellowship.” I wanted the water but not the fellowship.

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.

I like Mark’s frequent mention of how people felt. In this week’s text, Herod is greatly perplexed about John the Baptist.

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

There's a broad consensus that peace between the Israelis and Palestinians depends on a two-state solution. So why doesn't it happen?

Reading through the gospel for this week is sort of a horrific treat. The beheading of John the Baptist is nothing if not a great story—drama, intrigue, tension, conflict, resolution. Even as a flashback (“John, whom I beheaded, has been raised!”) to explain Herod’s response to Jesus’ ministry, it’s the kind of story one doesn’t want to read and yet cannot stop reading. But compelling as it is, I don’t necessarily want to preach about a head on a platter.

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.

Just in case we don't get it yet, we are now told of John the Baptist.

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 other day I was sitting in a coffee shop and couldn’t help overhearing an interesting and intense debate on the other side of the room. An older gentleman was trying his best to aid an inquisitive college student who had some hard-hitting questions. She asked about scripture, about authority and about the church. One question kept popping up: “What is the difference between truth for you, truth for me and truth with a capital T?”