Month: January 2025

Now the word of the LORD came to me saying,”Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Then I said, “Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy” [Jeremiah 1:4-6]. “If you don’t have a call, then you better get one.” This seminary humor circulates endlessly in divinity schools. Its persistence speaks to a universal truth about the nature of calling. The joke’s irony lies in suggesting we can manufacture what only God can initiate. The tension between human agency and divine calling…

All the people gathered together into the square before the Water Gate… They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the law of Moses …. He read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and women and those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law …. And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people; and when he opened it, all the people stood up … and they bowed their heads and worshiped…

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding [John 2:1-2, a portion of the Gospel reading assigned for this Sunday, the Second Sunday after the Epiphany, RCL, Year C]. In John’s Gospel, the first glimpse we have of Jesus’ public ministry doesn’t arrive with heavenly fanfare. No angels sing. No star guides magi from the East. After the Gospel writer’s soaring prologue about the Word becoming flesh, after John the Baptizer’s testimony and those first curious disciples beginning to follow, after Jesus’ enigmatic promise to Nathanael about “seeing…

Now when all the people were baptized and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” [Luke 3:21-22]. Last weekend, as I sat with the lectionary readings for this Sunday's celebration of the Baptism of our Lord [First Sunday after the Epiphany, Luke 3:15-17, 21-22, RCL, Year C], a detail in Luke’s gospel caught my eye, one that I'd somehow missed in all my years of reading this familiar text. Describing the scene when…

Hear the word of the LORD, O nations, and declare it in the coastlands far away; say, “He who scattered Israel will gather him and will keep him as a shepherd does a flock” [Jeremiah 31:10]. The Word became flesh and lived among us [John 1:14]. In the wake of Jerusalem’s destruction by Babylonian forces in 587 BCE, the prophet Jeremiah—who had long warned of impending judgment—turns to words of consolation. The scattered people will be gathered from “the farthest parts of the earth” (31:8). God will lead them “by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble’ (31:9). “Then shall the young women rejoice…