'Luke' Tagged Posts
Extravagant Love
For the second week in a row (Luke 15, John 12), we had a Gospel text that mentions an extravagant sharing of love (a party thrown for a younger son thought dead, and this week Mary anointing Jesus’ feet with costly perfume). For the second week in a row there was someone (the older brother, Judas) so wrapped up in their narrow, self-centered mode of thinking and…
The Economics of Abundance
We’re steeped in a model of scarcity. The idea that something is scarce begins from a place of limits. There’s only so much of something to go around – time, money, water, food, land, hours of work to be divvied among employees, etc. In this mode of scarcity, for someone or some group to get more means there is less to go around, and potentially less for me, or for you.…
An Extremist For Love
In Letter From A Birmingham Jail, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. asks the question, “Was not Jesus an extremist for love?”He then quotes from Sunday’s Gospel text, a continuation of Jesus’ sermon on the level place, Luke 6:27-38, saying, “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you…”…
A Level Place
In the Gospel according to Matthew (chapters 5-7), Jesus gives an extended teaching we call the “Sermon on the Mount,” but Luke (in chapte 6) records Jesus giving many of the similar teachings on “a level place.” I grew up on a house that was near the top of a hill. The house in which I currently reside is about halfway up a hill. It’s…
Holy Disruption
“We tend to think in systems and continuities and predictability and schemes and plans. I think the Bible is to some great extent focused on God’s capacity to break those schemes open and violate those formulae.”-Walter Brueggemann What in the world could make the people of Jesus’ hometown so upset that they would chase him to the edge of a cliff…
Fulfilled In Your Hearing
When words are spoken and heard, something happens. Things that may have been a distant memory, or something we read once, come to life again when we hear them proclaimed. Maybe it’s that we hear it in a new way, pick up on a new detail, or the speaker emphasizes something different from what you would have emphasized. In last Sunday’s gospel reading…