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Lent 1 Year A 2026: Genesis 2:15-17;3:1-7

20th century theologian Karl Barth was once at a party where he was asked if the snake in the garden did indeed talk, to which he responded, “Madam, it does not matter whether or not the serpent really spoke; what matters is what the serpent said.” No text in Genesis (or likely the entire Bible) has been more used, interpreted, and misunderstood than the story of the snake and Eve. This applies to careless, popular theology as well as to the doctrine of the church. (Brueggemann, 41) It has been assumed that today’s text from Genesis is a decisive text for the Bible and that it states the premise for all that follows. In fact, this is an exceedingly marginal text. No clear subsequent reference to it is made in the Old Testament. And even in the New Testament the linkage developed in the Augustinian tradition of anthropology regarding original sin and human nature is based on the argument of Paul in the early chapters of Romans. Even Paul does not make general appeal to this text. (41) F...
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Epiphany 5 Year A 2026: Isaiah 58:1-12

Commentator Paul Hanson titles his chapter on Isaiah 58, “Your Own Interests, or the Interests of God?” In order for that question to really sink in, it’s important to remember that the “I” in the reading is not Isaiah, personally. What makes the people listen to Isaiah is that he speaks on behalf of God. He’s God’s mouthpiece. Or perhaps it is better stated that they are God’s mouthpiece. Because, Isaiah is not even one person; there are at least three separate voices from the person called “Isaiah”, probably more. What matters is that all of the “me”s, “my”s, and “I”s in here are God. Even more than that, they are a God who speaks in poetry, not prose. In today’s text we are two chapters into what Bible scholars call “Third Isaiah”. We are coming out of the reminder in Second Isaiah that the redemptive activity of God occurs within the real stuff of human experience and world history. Although it is poetic in its language, it is not to be diminished as being solely metaphor. The savi...
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Epiphany 4 Year A 2026: Matthew 5:1-12

My husband and six-year-old took advantage of the bitterly cold weather last weekend to finish playing the Legend of Zelda game Tears of the Kingdom together. She loves to backseat game with him. She has many questions about the plot and many suggestions about what he ought to do. At one point in the game, Zelda swallows this stone that turns her into an immortal dragon, incapable of human thought and feeling. The dragon embodies her innate light, allowing her to live until the Master Sword and Link are prepared for the final battle. Zelda sacrificed her personhood to immortality to save her kingdom. My husband said the first time he played Tears of the Kingdom , that scene almost brought him to tears. This experience of Zelda has got me thinking about ways in which immortality is presented in stories. Typically, whoever is immortal is not to be envied, but rather pitied. Those who strive for immortality typically don’t receive it, or they do so in such a way that makes them instantl...
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Epiphany 3 Year A 2026: 1 Corinthians 1:10-18

During my first year in seminary, our Intro to New Testament class was assigned formal debates. We were given topics addressed in Pauls’ Epistle to the Corinthians and prepared a pro or con position. Judges were brought in from outside the class to decide whether our arguments for or against eating food sacrificed to idols were more convincing. My team won that debate. I brought up this story in a text thread of classmates as we were all writing our sermons this week. The group text includes a member of the opposing team who is apparently still salty about the “lack of imagination” in the judging panel. The first letter of Paul to the Corinthians was written in around the year 54 to a congregation he had founded several years earlier. Corinth was a large and prospering urban center with an ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse population. Paul writes from Ephesus, where he intends to stay for a while before traveling to Macedonia and then on to Corinth. The congregation of th...
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Epiphany 2 Year A 2025: Psalm 40

“In his book, The Souls of Black Folk , W.E.B. Dubois discusses ‘sorrow songs,’ music created by African captives, exiled in America. The songs are laments, prayers sung to God as a form of protest and supplication, looking for justice from a righteous God. The original American music conveys ‘soul-hunger’ and ‘restlessness’, ‘unvoiced longing toward a truer world’. The music also carries ‘hope - a faith in the final justice of things’. In the sorrow songs we have a window into the identities of an oppressed people and their belief in a God who saw them and would remember them. In their music they wrestled with ‘good and evil, suffering and pain.’ Their laments, like those in the psalms, created sacred space, a sanctuary for the soul.” (Fentress-Williams, 144) The psalms are typically sorted into certain types or genres that reflect their usage in various contexts, especially in the worship life of ancient Israel. There are thanksgiving psalms, hymns, wisdom psalms, creation psalms, li...
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Christmas Eve 2025

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to teach children’s Sunday School. I decided I’d take the opportunity to…crowdsource…my Christmas Eve sermon. Kids will every so often just throw out something that is really profound. So I asked the kids what I should talk about on Christmas Eve. Their suggestion? Dinosaurs. There was a part of me that wanted to try and take their advice. But the amount of mental and theological gymnastics I would have to do to come up with a Christmas message on Dinosaurs would result in something no one would want to hear. So my apologies to the Sunday School from the Second Sunday in Advent, even though the Flintstones and Dino the dinosaur do celebrate Christmas (which makes no sense because they predate Jesus), this will not be a dinosaur homily. Just plain old God incarnate. We start with Mary and Joseph traveling the 90 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem. This would have been about a four-day journey on foot. I’ve wondered why Mary was travelling with ...
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Advent 4 Year A 2025: Matthew 1:18-25

My great grandfather’s name was Burdette Gunn. I love old timey names, and Burdette is about as old timey Midwest as they get. The way the family story goes is that Burdette died at age 39 in 1948 after being hit by a train. My mother never met her grandfather, but remembers many kind stories about him. It is a tradition in my family to visit all the local graves of our loved ones around Memorial Day and to tell stories about their pasts. For some reason, this year I decided to Google Burdette to see if I could find anything about the train collision that killed him. That’s where I found the obituary and the wrongful death lawsuit stating that he died in a head-on collision, most certainly not hit by a train. A car crash. He wasn’t doing anything he shouldn’t have been doing, the other driver simply crossed the center line and hit him head-on. My mom and I don’t know when or why the story changed. And now, everyone who would know is dead, so we’ll never know. My mother reeled for a whi...
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