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If you had to choose one passage to summarize all of Israel’s Scripture, you could do worse than Exodus 34:6-7. Scholars call it the Bible’s “graciousness formula” (leave it to us scholars to domesticate grace (...)

It is among the masses in Galilee that Jesus commences his healing and teaching ministry.1 Jesus’ popularity as a man who can heal whatever ails a person spreads beyond the Galilean borders. Jesus’ newly acquired (...)

Professor McClure is the Charles G. Finney Professor of Homiletics at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee. His special interests are in the relationships between philosophy, theology, ethics, popular culture and preaching. His publications include (...)

Christmas is the season when Christians remember the birth of Jesus as God’s greatest gift to humankind. Not everyone, however, considers this celebration in the same way. In the ancient world, the Roman Empire viewed (...)

Historically, Acts has been read by the church in worship during the Season of Easter. This is because it is the only narrative in the New Testament that tells the story of the community that (...)

Jesus’ fidelity and the Twelve’s faltering: these cables bind the Last Supper and Gethsemane in Mark. In a large upper room (Mark 14:22-31): Previously Jesus presided over two other banquets during which he “took, blessed, (...)

Familiarity breeds complacency: the challenge facing the preacher this Sunday. If we read Mark carefully, the evangelist himself restores to these texts a sense of mystery and surprise. Jesus’ entrance to Jerusalem (Mark 11:1-11) seems (...)

As you read this, I’m going to take a wild guess that you’re feeling somewhat stressed and anxious. It’s one of the vexing ironies of the Christmas season that the peace it proclaims can be (...)

The “lectionary gnomes” have done the preacher no favor in isolating this passage from its preceding verses. First John 2:28-29 encourages Christians to “abide,” or persist with endurance, in that domain defined once for all (...)

This climatic passage, with its rich metaphor and intense interaction, aims to move us finally to a confession, a claiming, a proclaiming. It is the revelation that all of the great I AM statements in (...)