Month: February 2026

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with that person” [John 3:1–2]. The Gospel reading for the Second Sunday in Lent (John 3:1–17) may be one of the most familiar passages in all of Scripture — and therein lies the problem. We know this text. We know it so well that John 3:16 has become perhaps the most quoted verse in the Bible, reduced to bumper stickers and signs…

The lectionary readings for the First Sunday in Lent (Year A) pair two narratives of temptation: the familiar account from Genesis 2:15-17 and 3:1-7, where the first humans encounter the serpent in the garden of Eden, and Matthew 4:1-11, where Jesus faces Satan’s threefold testing in the wilderness. Both texts explore the nature of human desire and divine limit, but they do so by presenting us with starkly different responses to what is offered and what is forbidden. Is the Creator allowed to have something within which He delights alone? The question sounds almost impertinent, yet it strikes at the heart of the Genesis narrative. God places the human creatures…

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became bright as light (Matthew 17:1–2). He took the three up the mountain. Peter, James, John—always the three. We didn’t ask why. We’d stopped asking. We watched them disappear into the mist and tried not to notice the familiar sting. What do nine disciples talk about when the inner circle climbs without them? We busied ourselves, mended nets, pretended not to look up at the peak. Then the father came, dragging…

When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified [1 Corinthians 2:1-2, a portion of the Epistle reading for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, RCL, Year A]. In 1986, when I entered Duke Divinity School at thirty-five, I arrived with expectations shaped by a decade of professional life. I wanted depth. I wanted to understand the theological architecture beneath what I’d learned in Sunday school and church. I wanted access to the tradition’s wisdom—systematic theology, biblical interpretation, church history. The…