Month: July 2026

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…