“Who do you say that I am?” I wonder who Jesus was looking at when he asked his disciples this question. He’d already asked the easy one, what are the crowds saying. But now, he wanted their own view, their personal understanding of what he was all about. I imagine...

We are often so much like Jesus’ first disciples in the early days. They followed Jesus around, from place to place, listening to his teaching, seeing what he was doing, and doing their best to understand. And we, like them, it seems, often don’t. If only we had more faith....

It’s Thanksgiving this week. I mean the holiday, of course, not “thanks giving,” which we should want to do everyday. Even if we’re particularly focused on harvest thanksgiving, I hope we’d want to be grateful to farmers and the earth more than just one day a year. Oh, and the...

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how important story is in our lives. We live in story, we learn in it, we grieve in it and find joy in it, we love in it and we die in it. I could probably have stopped at “we live in it,”...

The other day, I was having a conversation with someone from a very different Christian denomination than my own. It wasn’t contradictory, confrontational or disagreeable. In fact, we were pretty much agreeing, though we described it more like “being on the same page.” I think we’d also both agree that...

There’s a story in the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus is approached by a woman who asks him to heal her daughter who is possessed by an “unclean spirit” (Mark 7:24).  There’s a brief, but probably a little heated, exchange of words and Jesus tells the woman to go home...

The story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is so often told as a miracle of Jesus power to give life, whether physical or spiritual. But what if there’s another lesson here, not for the dead, but the living? “Jesus,” the boy called, “Jesus, you must come now. Lazarus...

Many people didn’t care for Jesus’ message. His closest followers had questions… “It’s a dog’s life,” Jesus said, one day. Several of the disciples nodded, one or two smiled, Peter said “pfft.” They all looked at him. “What? Really? You think so?” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,...

You might have noticed that, for the last little while, most of my posts have been about story. Either the story-telling nature of the bible or re-telling bible stories or creating stories from the seed of a bible story. That’s because I’m on a sabbatical leave and stories are what...

Have you ever been invited into a miracle? It should be abundantly clear from anyone’s telling of the story that it wasn’t planned. It wasn’t a rally or a convention, not a jamboree or a festival. There was no reason to think about organization. People just showed up. They came...