18th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, RCL)

"Speak the truth in love," and "see that none of you repays evil for evil," exhorts St. Paul. Which is easier said than done.

There are lots of ways to talk about the relationship between sports and religion.

The opening scene of Bull Durham comes to mind. As does the cultic quality of America’s obsession with football.

Sport as the center of personal and communal piety has a long history in many cultures, with the U.S. perhaps—to keep the competition motif alive here—winning the prize for the world’s most zealous devotees of the faith.

Perhaps we should not be too hard on the people who ate their fill on the mountain and chased Jesus down on the other side.

The psalms are poignant. They bear emotion in a way that grabs our souls. They are comprehended by the heart in a way the head can’t.

But I falter when I try to preach them.

“There is the danger of protecting ourselves from God by striving to be passive. The ‘I’ is very active in its attempt to surrender.”

Snow can be tiresome, even deadly, but it can also be a sign of holiness and of hope.

We all live out our lives in the wilderness.

What is manna? Is it a Hebrew pun on mah hu, or as Everett Fox suggests, “Whaddayacallit”? Is it mountains of sweet insect excrement, as proposed by some scholars, or the stuff of legend?

Psalm 51 does not let any of us off the hook—not the progressives, the evangelicals, or the feel-good agnostics.

It is the day after Jesus fed the 5,000. The picnic is over and Jesus has taken his disciples to the other side of the lake. But the crowds of people who shared the meal with him yesterday and who then tried to turn him into their king are not about to let him go.