I've heard quite a few sermons on this passage that can basically be summed up by the title of a book by John Ortberg: If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat. According to these sermons, Peter had the right idea getting out of the boat, literally “stepping out on faith.” The problem is Peter took his eyes off Jesus, and his faith faltered, but Jesus was there to save him. We are told, we need to be like Peter and summon up the courage to swing our leg

Jesus tells his disciples, “You feed them.” The disciples look confused. “Us? We don’t have anything to give them. We’re all out. Nothing left.” The disciples get together and come up with five small loaves and two fishes. It’s nothing much. Jesus says, “Bring your nothing to me.” He then blesses the food, breaks the loaves, and hands the bread pieces and fish to the disciples to distribute, to all 5,000 men and their families.

In the book called How to Do Things With Words , the author claims words don't simply describe things, they make things happen. When it comes to words that create worlds, there is no better example than Jesus’ parables. In these brief, simple stories, Jesus doesn’t just relate information to us about God or about heaven. He’s calling a new reality into being. These stories don’t just describe the new order God is bringing to earth, as much as they cause it to come to lif

Whenever I see a weed, it just seems to scream, “Pull me!” When Jesus tells stories about farming, his stories simply don’t make any agricultural sense. Listen to the story again - A farmer plows his field, sows it with wheat of the highest quality, and goes to bed that night. While he was sleeping an enemy comes and lays some weed seed in the same furrows. So as the wheat starts to grow, the farmer's hired hands notice the weed growing with the wheat and ask the farmer

Rarely did Jesus say things bluntly or straightforwardly. More often than not, he came at a truth indirectly, sideways-like, in order to come in under our defenses and around our prejudices. His best tools in this were his “parables.” In them, Jesus takes images drawn from familiar things and uses them a new way, to explain God’s Kingdom. It’s to our benefit then that Jesus’ first parable is such an easy one to understand. The story begins with a man who goes forth to s

Joseph Henrich makes the argument in his recent book The Weirdest People in the World, that We in the West are just Weird. Perhaps you’re thinking, what does this have to do with the Gospel lesson this morning? “Whoever loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” Jesus wasn’t undermining the local family, so much as calling into question the power structure of society as a whole.

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. So ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into the harvest” (9:38). Just as the disciples kneel down to pray, Jesus turns to them and tells them that God has answered their prayer— Jesus tells them, “You’re hired!” They’ve been drafted to join in Jesus’ work, to do the very things he’s been doing—teaching, healing, preaching, casting out demons.

Today’s lesson from Matthew’s Gospel could righty be titled, “Jesus is on the move.” For over the course of a few verses, we see Jesus going from person to person, encounter to encounter, bringing healing and wholeness and reconciliation everywhere he goes.

Today is Trinity Sunday, the day when the Church celebrates and contemplates the triune nature of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It used to be that the question of the Trinity was at the center of vital debate in the Church. Nowadays, churches and theologians happily relegate the Trinity to the margins. And yet, it is important that we continue to observe this holy day.

What the Ascension of Christ marks is not really God’s absence but rather God’s ubiquity, his omni-presence, his everywhereness. Because Jesus has ascended, left the physical plane of existence, he is now present everywhere on earth. No longer is Christ’s presence limited to the small space taken up by his human body. He is now able to be present throughout all creation, as he sits above it all, ruling over the whole earth, from his throne beside God the Father.

Coming as we are to the tail end of the Easter season, when it’s harder and harder to maintain excitement at the news of Jesus’ resurrection, John in the passage before us today channels Popeil, insisting, “But wait, there’s more,” more to Easter than the promise of our resurrection.

The only way we can say that, though, to claim Jesus is the way, is to follow his way ourselves. This involves learning the way of Jesus, picking up his rhythms and ways of doing things.

In today’s reading from John, Jesus is speaking to his disciples about fences, specifically the kind that you keep sheep in, a “sheepfold.” He says that those who are thieves and bandits try to “hop the fence,” but the shepherd comes in the right way, through the gate, and the sheep know him, know his voice, and they follow him.

The two disciples in this morning’s Gospel lesson seem to think that by getting out of Dodge maybe they could escape their grief, could leave behind the bad memories of the previous Friday. Jerusalem had become like an empty house from which all the children had gone, haunted by memories, by pain, by hopes that never materialized. Jerusalem was the place where their dreams had died. It was time to hit the road and see if they could leave their troubles behind.

Walking into a Christian church, one of the cues that helps to tell you whether you are in a Roman Catholic church or Protestant church is the presence of either the crucifix (Catholic) or the cross (Protestant). The crucifix, displaying the crucified Jesus, often hangs above the altar, while the bare cross more often than not sits on the altar table or on a shelf behind it.

The remarkable thing about Easter is that Jesus was not just raised from the dead, or that he defeated the powers of sin and death, but that he also returned to his disciples. It would have been enough that Jesus was resurrected, but he also came back to his fearful followers.

Easter may ultimately be about things that are high, bright, light and clear, but it begins low, dim, dark and murky. That’s what we see in our Gospel lesson this morning from John. Here we are told that, for Mary Magdalen, the day that would eventually become celebrated as Easter began “while it was still dark.”

God is not particularly concerned with our happiness, but God is very concerned with our holiness. He is concerned with our commitment and not our pleasure. On the cross, Jesus shows us how far God goes to show us His love and he shows us what it means to be his follower, to love as he loves us.

The writer Annie Dillard, in one of her short stories, has a scene in which a family is sadly gathered at a grave to commit a loved one’s body to the earth. At one point the minister intones the familiar words from I Corinthians, “Where, O Death, is thy sting?” Upon hearing that, one of the family members looks up. He scans the sorrowful faces of his family and sees all around him rows of headstones. And then he thinks to himself, “Why, it’s just about everywhere, seeing a

The healing of the man born blind is significant if only because it had never been done before. No one had ever gained sight when they were born without it. Not in the Old Testament, nor in any stories from ancient times that I can recall. It was a miracle without parallel. It entailed not just fixing a damaged organ but essentially creating new ones, new eyes. But beyond the physical healing, more important is what is signified by the miracle.