The Riverside Gathering Posts

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A – Jonah 3:10-4:11 But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry [Jonah 4:1]. Jonah’s story is among the most familiar in the Old Testament—or at least we remember its most memorable scene. There is a storm, a man thrown overboard, and an enormous fish. Many of us remember a whale, though the text clearly says fish. After three days, the fish vomits Jonah onto dry land. A man who seemed certain to drown has been rescued. It makes a satisfying ending. And yet, the story doesn’t end here. The fish has become so dominant in many of our memories that we…

High Shoals, NC 1922 Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A – Exodus 14:19-31 Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea. The LORD drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and turned the sea into dry land, and the waters were divided. The Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left. – Exodus 14:21-22 Since I was seven, I had walked the same three-quarter mile, loom room to porch, porch to church, counting my body among the mill’s machines — useful, plain, expected to run until it didn’t. Thirty-two years old,…

Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A — Romans 13:8–14 Owe no one anything, except to love one another. — Romans 13:8 Those of us who follow the Revised Common Lectionary sometimes forget how much work went into it. Its predecessor, the Common Lectionary, was published in 1983, three years before I entered Duke Divinity School. Many of us used that lectionary during my years at Duke. After two complete three-year cycles of testing and extensive feedback from participating churches, the Revised Common Lectionary was published in 1992—three years after my graduation. Selecting its readings was no easy assignment. The Bible is much too large to be read in its entirety…

Exodus 1:15-21 — The Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah who defied Pharaoh’s order to kill newborn boys. We knew the sound of first breath— that sharp cry that splits silence and announces another soul has fought its way into light. For years we had answered the call, rushing through Hebrew doorways where women labored and prayed, our hands steady, our voices calm. We knew the weight of new life, slippery and warm and crying, how a mother’s face transforms when she sees what love has made. Then Pharaoh summoned us. Two Hebrew midwives called before the throne of the man who owned our world. His voice was cold as marble:…

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…