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I have had the great fortune to teach in several seminaries, and to work on multiple bishops’ staffs to coordinate continuing education and lay preacher development. No matter which educational setting, one of the chief (...)

Paul wrote Galatians to convince its recipients that they have right relationship with God (are justified) through the faithful working of Christ that comes to them through faith and not through keeping the Mosaic law (...)

If Galatians 3:23–29 talks about baptism as liberation from the binary prison of domination, warfare, and exclusion, chapter 5 starts with a passionate plea to stay within this precious realm of baptismal freedom and to (...)

Condensed into seven verses, our text seems to capture both the best and the worst of Pauline interpretation. The famous baptismal formula in Galatians 3:26–28 declares the end of all racial, class, and gender divisions (...)

We do not usually tell ghost stories in church, but this road-to-Emmaus story is exactly that—a ghost story. It has all the elements of a good ghost story: A shadowy figure of a dead person (...)

We are familiar with the moments of Jesus’ Passion the church remembers in its observation of Good Friday: Jesus’ arrest, Peter’s denials, the cruel abuse of Jesus by his captors, the mockery of a trial (...)

For the joyous, celebratory day of Easter, the lectionary returns us to Paul’s letter to believers in Corinth. Remember that among them was an irritating group with an attitude of spiritual superiority (see the commentary (...)

Nothing displayed Roman power like crucifixion, an act designed to publicly execute revolutionaries and slaves with utmost shame and disgrace as a means of punishment, cruel amusement, and deterrence for revolutionaries present and future. Josephus (...)

Using his own life as a paradigm,1 Paul presents us in this passage with a brief existential description of what it actually means to live “through the faith of the Messiah Jesus” rather than trusting (...)

Easter season in Year C gives preachers an opportunity to explore the most troublemaking book of the New Testament. Left uninterpreted, Revelation (no -s, please!) will be exploited and distorted, again and again. But read (...)