Sermons

Today’s gospel lessons, concerning the Syrophoenician woman and the deaf mute is the answer to the question, “Who is Jesus?” Jesus becomes the living answer to the promise of Isaiah that God will restore creation. From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands

This Sunday’s reading concludes the six-week unit of John 6. The focus of this passage is on the choice of the community to receive the life Christ gives. Some turn away and some remain. Peter speaks for those who have received the gift of being fed by God in Christ, “To whom shall we go? You

Jesus uses an impossible metaphor not unlike the earlier use of being “born again” to underscore the tension between the commitment demanded by living in the new community gathered around Jesus and loyalty to a prior social reality. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever

So when the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus. When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you,

David rose to power because of his uncompromising commitment to God. His fidelity is waning. David is not at the front with his troops but back in Jerusalem. His abuse of power and fidelity is contrasted with his fidelity to God, to country and to the family of Uriah. In the spring of the year,

The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by

King Herod heard of it, for Jesus’ name had become known. Some were saying, ‘John the baptizer has been raised from the dead; and for this reason these powers are at work in him.’ But others said, ‘It is Elijah.’ And others said, ‘It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.’ But when

Before Jesus was rejected by religious and political authorities, he was rejected in his hometown. The disciples became his new community. It is the companionship of this new community that empowers Jesus’ followers to invite people into a changed life, to cast out that which haunts and to be

When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him; and he was by the sea. Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come

On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being

…and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’ And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, ‘He has Beelzebub, and by the ruler of the demons he