Church Blog

In Luke 13, there is a woman hunched over for the last eighteen years who meets Jesus in a synagogue. Calling her over to himself, Jesus says, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” And just like that, “she stood up straight and began praising God.” Well, all this happens on a Sabbath day, which makes the synagogue leader feel the need to stand up and protest. “Come on one of the other six days of the week to…

There is a vineyard and the man who owns it. There is a fig tree and the gardener who tends to it. The fig tree was planted three years ago and has yet to bear any fruit at all. The owner wants it gone. Three years is plenty to expect some results. Why should it waste the soil? Why not plant something else in its place, something with the potential to produce fruit? The vineyard owner has been patient enough.…

Keep your lamps lit, Jesus says in Luke 12. Be like servants in the house whose boss is set to return tonight. Maybe the boss will return in the evening. Or maybe it will be the middle of the night. Or maybe it will be nearly sunrise. Whatever the case may be, the servants’ patient watchfulness will be rewarded when he finally comes home. He’ll be so happy with them that he sits them down at the table and serves…

A funeral. A widow. A mom with no son now. This is the scene in the town of Nain when Jesus enters (Luke 7:11-17). As soon as Jesus shows up, Luke immediately tells us everything that is disheartening about this mourning mom’s situation. She’s already buried her husband. Now she’s burying her only son. In this ancient context, a woman was typically reliant on the man in her life for economic stability. In the absence of her husband, she would…

A new Exodus! God’s people have been freed from sin and death. We have trekked our baptismal path through Jesus’ death and resurrection and have arrived at newness of life, no longer enslaved to sin (Romans 6:1-14). But Paul isn’t finished yet, and this discussion of freedom from our slavery to sin is about to take a strange turn. To belong to Christ is to be freed from the enslaving gravity of sin. However, Paul still describes our new, baptized…

I don’t know about you, but I experience a bit of whiplash when reading Romans, especially chapters 5-6. Paul is doing such a masterful job of defining for us reality as it really is. Reality according to Romans 5-6 is this: God is perfectly at peace with us and perfectly reconciled to us. Grace has defeated (humiliated!) sin and death. Baptism has immersed us into the death and new life of Jesus. What it means for us to be human…

How much time do we spend being disappointed in ourselves for not being able to move past our old and tired ways of thinking, speaking, and behaving? We desire to think, speak, and behave in ways that belong to a new way of being human, and we are regularly discouraged that it’s not happening sooner. Except, it is happening, nay, already did! Paul in Romans 6 makes an astonishing, impossible declaration. “We who died to sin cannot go on living…

When we read Romans 5, it’s like sin is a spreading sickness and Adam is patient zero. To exist under the power of sin is simply an undeniable part of what it means to be human. It’s been in our DNA since the first human being. And where there is sin, death is nearby. Death is sin’s partner, the great sign that God’s project of breathing new life into existence has been contaminated. Sin and death have “reigned,” says Romans…

There is a gift we receive from the apostle Paul that I don’t think he gets enough credit for – the gift of the past tense. This gift is on full display all over Paul’s letters, including Romans 5. We have peace with God and have obtained free access to his grace. God has poured his love into our hearts. Christ died for all of us sinners, and we have been justified (that is, our relationship to him has been…

I think it’s worthwhile to read Romans “backwards,” that is, viewing the whole letter through the lens of its later chapters in which the worshiping community in Rome itself comes to the fore of Paul’s attention. Everything that is rich and challenging in Romans eventually adds up to the (strained) relationships between the members of the church. “Let us no longer pass judgment on one another,” Paul says in Romans 14:13. The whole letter has been working its way toward…

In Romans 4, our eyes are opened to the God of miracles, the God who calls Abraham out of obscurity and makes impossible promises to him – and keeps them! It is the same God of Psalm 32, who forgives sins not because we, in our wisdom and effort, convince him to do it but because it is simply in his nature to forgive. The God of miracles is the ancestry of the Church. Paul alerts us to this ancestry…

Psalm 32 begins with, “Happy [or, Blessed] are those whose transgression is forgiven.” We see this here and there in scripture and we know what to call it: beatitude, a pronouncement of what the good life, the happy life looks like. If you ask Psalm 32, the happy, blessed life is to experience forgiveness, to receive the good news that God is looking at you and seeing something other than the mistakes you’ve made. And this is nothing short of…