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Preachers face a temptation to emphasize everything good about the life of faith. We shouldn’t forget these good things, but sometimes faith is marked by struggle, difficulty, and wrestling. Building to this moment Jacob faces (...)

Trauma theorists tell us that one of the essential steps for trauma victims in reconstituting their shattered lives is to repair their narrative identity—that is, constructing fragments of their former selves into a sense-making narrative.1 (...)

Isaac and Rebekah go 20 years without a child (Genesis 25:20, 26). Things look as hopeless for them as they did for Abraham and Sarah. But both Isaac and Rebekah have access to God. Isaac (...)

The book of Jeremiah revisits his calling—not to celebrate it, but to wrestle with it. Jeremiah 20:7–13 offers one of the most honest and troubling reflections on prophetic ministry in all of Scripture. In this (...)

Genesis 1 narrates God’s magisterial creation of our universe in a grand liturgical style, even as it leaves readers with many interpretive possibilities. Awe and wonder I encourage preachers to approach this overly familiar account (...)

Throughout the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we frequently see Jesus using parables to describe the reign of God. Yet the opposite is true in the Gospel of John: Jesus does not use (...)

The Valley of Dry Bones is perhaps the best-known text from the book of Ezekiel. In it, the Spirit of the Lord leads the prophet back and forth throughout a valley filled with bones. Or (...)

As I write this biblical reflection—more theological and historical, likely—I start with a confession. After years of preaching the lectionary texts, and most often choosing the first reading or the psalm for the week, I (...)

Challenges abound for interpreters of this opening section of the Sermon on the Mount.  How does the sermon function, and for whom? Does it set out entry standards for encountering God’s empire, or does it (...)

The question that springs to mind immediately upon reading this text is, “Why is this here?” Many of us are familiar with the story of Jesus “cleansing the temple,” but in the synoptic tradition (Matthew, (...)