John 11:1-45 Dear Partner in Preaching, Once again we’re offered – or faced with, depending on your mood 🙂 – a really, really long story from the Gospel According to John. As with the earlier stories, it can be both helpful and effective to focus on a particular detail to help hearers enter the story as a whole and experience its evangelical force. This week, however, I was struck by the dramatic movement of the story and how following that movement can offer us an opportunity to take stock of, and participate in, God’s ongoing and dynamic action in the life of our congregations. There are, I think, three major movements to this...

John 9:1-41 Dear Partner in Preaching, A single brief question late in the week: Why do we call the main character in this story “the man born blind” or “the man who had been blind”? Maybe you don’t call it that, but that’s the way I’ve normally heard it. And I’m curious as to why. The obvious reason, I suppose, is that this is the way the Gospel of John refers to him. At least some of the time. In the first verse of John’s ninth chapter, he is described as a “man blind from birth.” Okay, that pretty descriptively accurate. Once Jesus heals him, he is referred to directly several more times. In v. 8, he is “the man...

John 4:5-42 Dear Partner in Preaching, How does someone come to faith? Not simply “faith” in the sense of intellectual or cognitive assent to doctrinal formulations like “Jesus is the Son of God.” But “faith” more in its biblical sense of trust, a living and active trust that makes it possible to take significant risks. I ask this question because I think today’s lengthy reading from John offers a vivid portrait of one such person coming to this kind of vibrant, trusting, risking-taking faith. In order to highlight the possibility of not just lifting up but inviting such faith, I’ll make one brief observation about the use of...

John 3:1-17 Dear Partner in Preaching, There’s a lot going on in today’s reading from John’s Gospel. And I mean A LOT! This passage, filled with images both familiar and odd, can be a lot to take in. St. Augustine chose an eagle to represent St. John because he felt the theology of the Fourth Evangelist soared so high above the other gospels, but sometimes it reaches heights that can be hard for many of us – both in the pulpit and in the pew – to follow. My guess is that amid the imagery of water and Spirit and the serpent lifted up in the wilderness and all the rest, our hearers’ attention will be drawn to two places in...

Matthew 4:1-11 Dear Partner in Preaching, I’m going to boil the heart of this passage down into one, probably pretty familiar, saying: You only know who you are when you realize whose you are. I usually mention this in terms of Baptism, and I’ll get there in this passage, I promise. But for now, I want to reference some research I read a long time ago (and so can’t remember the source, though I suspect it might be Seth Godin’s Tribes). Essentially, it contended that while we typically think of identity as something we forge on our own, most of our sense of ourselves comes from the community we belong to, our family of origin, and the...

Matthew 17:1-9 Dear Partner in Preaching, “Listen to him.” “Be raised up.” “Do not be afraid.” If there were ever three words of instruction, command, and promise I need to hear right now, it’s probably these. Just to set the scene: six days after Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah – and Jesus’ rebuke of Peter’s understanding of what it means to be the Messiah – Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up a mountain and is transfigured. That is, his appearance is literally changed right in front of them, so that while they recognize their Lord they also perceive his heavenly glory in a way they had not before....

Matthew 5:38-48 Dear Partner, Ahh, the temptations we preachers are going to feel as we read this difficult passage! I’ve preached it enough, and you probably have to, to be familiar with at least two of them. The first will be to not take it seriously. I call this the “Lutheran temptation” simply because when Lutherans get to really difficult says from Jesus, we tend to assume that Jesus didn’t really expect us to do these things, only to remind us of our inability to satisfy God’s commands so that we might flee to Jesus for forgiveness and grace. While I’m not sure this actually reflects Luther’s thought, some of his...

Matthew 5:21-37 Dear Partner, What do you think of when you think of God? What picture comes to mind when you imagine what God is like? It’s a tricky question, I realize, as Scripture regularly describes the impossibility of seeing, let alone fully understanding, God. When Moses wants to see God, for instance, the most God offers is facing Moses toward the cleft of a rock so he can see the “trail of God’s glory” as God passes by for, as God says, “no one can see me and live” (Ex. 33:20-23). Similarly, St. John, in the prologue to his Gospel, says that “no one has seen God” (Jn. 1:18a). Despite these biblical affirmations,...

Matthew 5:13-20 Dear Partner in Preaching, It’s a promise, not a command. This is, I think, the absolutely crucial element of this passage to keep in mind and allow to shape your sermon. Jesus isn’t saying, “You should be the salt of the earth and light of the world.” Or, “You have to be,…” let alone “You better be,….” Rather, he is saying, you are. As in already are. Even if you don’t know it. Even if you once knew it and forgot. Even if you have a hard time believing it. Jesus is making to his disciples a promise about their very being, he is not commanding, let alone threatening, them about what they should be...

Matthew 5:1-12 Dear Partner in Preaching, Matthew tells the story a little differently. You probably know that just as well as I do. Yet when I read the “Sermon the Mount” I sometimes blend Matthew’s account and Luke’s together, blurring some of the distinctiveness. In Luke, for instance, Jesus offers his sermon not on a mountain but a “level plain.” And in Luke Jesus preaches to “a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people” (Lk. 6:17). But in Matthew Jesus has just twelve disciples – the twelve we often call them – representing the twelve tribes of Israel. The crowds,...