The Riverside Gathering Posts

Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A — Psalm 133 How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity. —Psalm 133:1 Grandson Andrew was three, perhaps four, when Jane and I gathered with Gray, April, and their brood for breakfast at one of the diners on Hilton Head Island a number of years ago. Andrew’s pancakes came. Someone had made the mistake of placing the syrup within his reach. I remember that he took the pitcher in both hands and began to pour. And then he poured some more. I sat uncomfortably at the other end of the table, watching a small lake of syrup spread across…

Copyright 2026. Thomas A. Robinson. All rights reserved. Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, RCL, Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28 They said to one another, “Here comes this dreamer…. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; … But when Reuben heard it, he [said], “Let us not take his life…. Shed no blood, throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, …” [Genesis 37:20-22]. I was the one who said: not with our hands. Let the pit take him instead of us— dry, empty, going nowhere. A hole in the ground is not a knife. I said it like mercy. I have had a…

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A · Isaiah 55:1–5 Ho, everyone who thirsts; come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. — Isaiah 55:1 Frost on the glass of the church hall doors before they opened. My mother’s coat smelled of woodsmoke and lye, and she held my hand tighter than she needed to. Nobody talked in that line. You learned to study your shoes, the cracked toe of the man ahead of you, anything that wasn’t a face. They gave you what they gave you. You said thank you. You meant it. You…

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A — 1 Kings 3:5-12 At Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said, "Ask what I should give you" [1 Kings 3:5]. Some eight or ten years ago, when Jane and I were an active part of Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church here in Durham, I was asked to co-lead a small evening program focusing on the richness of the Old Testament, specifically on how much can turn on a translator’s choice of a single word. Each of us had chosen a passage to illustrate what sometimes gets gained or lost depending on which English Bible happens to be…

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A — Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 Let both of them grow together until the harvest [Matthew 13:30]. Years ago, during my time at Asbury, a gardener I knew — a woman who had spent decades with her hands in North Carolina soil — told me about a young couple new to Durham. Like so many who land here, drawn by the university and its constant churn of academic hope, they had come from somewhere colder, somewhere without much of a growing season, and they arrived determined to have a garden of their own. They’d read the right books. They knew, in the abstract, what a garden…

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Year A — Isaiah 55:10-13; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there… [Isaiah 55:10] A sower went out to sow. [Matthew 13:3] He did not first test the soil. He didn’t walk the field in advance, marking which patches were worth the seed and which were not. He simply went out, opened his hand, and scattered. Some of it fell on the path, where the ground had been packed hard by countless footsteps, and the birds came before it had so much as touched down. Some fell on rocky ground, where there was barely…

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost — Zechariah 9:9–12 Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore to you double [Zechariah 9:12]. Most of us have met this text before, though perhaps not within the long season after Pentecost. The ninth chapter of Zechariah supplied the words that the Evangelists reached for when they described Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey — Lo, your king comes to you — and so the passage has become, for many readers, a kind of prelude to Holy Week, heard briefly and then subsumed into that larger story. That is not wrong, exactly. But it means we have probably…

Fifth Sunday After Pentecost, Year A — Jeremiah 28:5–9 Amen! May the LORD do so; may the LORD fulfill the words that you have prophesied. — Jeremiah 28:6 The word “Amen” has a long history in church. We know what it feels like when it arrives—from the pew, from the pulpit, from the room itself. It is a word of recognition, of solidarity. Something true has been spoken, and the room says so together. In one of this week’s Old Testament texts, Jeremiah says it too, at the opening of his response to the prophet Hananiah. “Amen. May the LORD do so.” But something different is happening in that Temple…

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A — Jeremiah 20:7-13 O LORD, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed. — Jeremiah 20:7 In our OT lesson for this Sunday, Jeremiah does not begin with a prayer. He begins with an accusation. The Hebrew verb translated “enticed” is not a gentle word. Elsewhere in Scripture it carries the sense of seduction, of one party working a deception on another who has let his guard down. Jeremiah is not so much disappointed in God; rather, he feels overmatched by Him — captured by a calling he did not fully choose and cannot now escape.…

Copyright 2026. Thomas A. Robinson, all rights reserved. Ruth 2–4 — The wealthy Bethlehem landowner who redeems Ruth the Moabitess and takes her as his wife. Did you see her before your foreman told you, this woman gleaning at the edges of your field, moving with a quiet dignity that poverty could not diminish, could not touch? What did your workers make of your instructions— leave extra grain, let her drink from your jars, speak no harsh word to this foreign woman working your fields under an unfamiliar sun? Was it her beauty that first caught your eye, or something fiercer—the way she bent and rose, hour after hour, faithful…