Month: October 2022

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save? [Habakkuk 1:2]. As I comb through the “Matrix”—my electronic system that houses a long-running journal, my sermons, homilies, meditations (like this one), and notes on scripture passages, I see a hole. Over these many years, I have devoted virtually no time at all to the minor prophet, Habakkuk. My only reference is buried in some notes I’ve assembled on Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Quoting from Habakkuk 2:4, St. Paul gives us one of his core theological principles: “the righteous shall live by faith” [Romans 1:17].…

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt. Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector [Luke 18:9-10]. In last week’s meditation, I allowed that Jesus’ parables are affirmatively unlike Aesop’s fables. They aren’t straightforward little vignettes, each with a clear lesson at the end to help us along in our everyday life. As Rick Lischer taught me so many years ago, if we seriously examine a parable, we’ll usually find that it tells us something we might not want to hear. Rather than smooth our feathers, Jesus’…

Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart …. “And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” [Luke 18:1, 6-8]. For many years, I had what I think was an erroneous understanding of Jesus’ parables. That is to say that for the first half of my life, I thought of them essentially as scriptural stories in the manner of Aesop’s Fables.…

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce [Jeremiah 29:4-5]. For many years now, I’ve long been drawn to Jeremiah, one of the least likely theological leaders in the Hebrew Bible. He’s from the wrong side of the tracks. A native of Anathoth, in the territory of Benjamin, Jeremiah had a lot going against him. Benjamin was the home of the first king, Saul. At the time, the Israelites wanted a king worse than anything else in the world. That’s what…