Sermons

At first glance, today’s Gospel story of Jesus healing the ten lepers might look less like a specifically Christian teaching and more like a morality tale. While Luke is a master story teller, and though Luke’s stories often do have a readily-grasped teaching or moral, to regard Luke merely as a gifted teller of moral stories is to underestimate Luke...

In the scriptures, grandmothers are exceedingly rare. Today’s epistle tells of the New Testament’s only-known grandmother. In his second letter to Timothy, Paul writes...

“Sin is the fire alarm that wakes us up to the possibility of true repentance,” Barbara Brown Taylor says. Before sin, however, first I want to speak of shoes...

The parable of the “dishonest manager” that we just heard has long been the problem child among Luke’s parables, for it is defiant in precluding easy explanation; and—I must say—I like it that way. How do I like it? Let me count the ways...

What strikes me about this pseudo-autobiographical passage is that the author believes an appeal to Paul’s sinful past and his subsequent “saving” by Christ would lend credibility. Though the author of 1 Timothy could have appealed to others parts of Paul’s life...