Mark

Not everything urgent is important. The difficulty is distinguishing between the two. In ministry, people's pressing needs seldom come before us in neat, conveniently timed packages. Instead, the minister is bombarded with legitimate requests and pleas from every side.

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

There is a puzzling and disturbing detail in Mark’s account of the storm at sea, one we often do not even notice. In verse 36, we are told that when Jesus heads across the sea with his disciples, “other boats were with him.”

Two people in great distress do what a third, the Gerasene demoniac, has already done: they interrupt and rearrange Jesus’ day.

On first reading, the two parables in today's Gospel text seem to make less and less sense. In the first, a sower seems to leave the seed to fend for itself. In the second, a tiny mustard seed becomes a bush large enough for its branches to provide shelter for birds. (In Matthew's telling, it's a full-size tree!) When we stop to think about it, both parables are preposterous.

Like the stories that come before it, the storm at sea is a parable of reversal.

Like the stories that come before it, the storm at sea is a parable of reversal.

I have come to realize how mysterious a thing a seed is.

By the third century, the gesture of giving became miniaturized.

If it hadn't been for the snakes, I might have let the reader continue. Instead I went to the lectern and quietly said, "we are stopping at verse 8 today."

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.

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.

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.

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.

To be a follower of the one who promised that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed is to expect a blessed in-breaking of peace.

In my lectionary columns and posts for the first two weeks in Lent, I am suggesting the Lenten theme of covenant. God’s plan of salvation is founded on a faithful relationship extended over time and space.

Over the past 20-plus years in my own faith journey, the Bible’s anthropology has taken primacy for me over its theology, providing a crucial reason for the importance of covenant to salvation. René Girard’s work proposes that what has “saved” us as a species—thus far—are the false gods of our own unconscious creation.

We are still learning what it means to be human, even as we learn who God truly is.

We are still learning what it means to be human, even as we learn who God truly is.