There is a Buddhist saying, “If you meet Buddha, kill him.” Weird? Clearly, the saying is meant to warn against idols, against illusions, against deceptions. We are easily deceived, easily fall into our own wishful thinking and illusions, and easily can turn everything and everyone into an idol. Every year, we kill the Christ …
A Vulnerable God
Christmas is the celebration of God’s vulnerability. It was the birth of a vulnerable baby that constituted God’s great plan for the redemption of human beings. So don’t turn God into a macho god, a warrior god, an imperial god! Immanuel = "God with us" in Hebrew. Jesus is a wonderful name, it has …
An Ill-Mannered Jesus
More than 200 newspapers carry the advice column of Judith Martin, better known as Miss Manners. I was curious to see if Miss Manners could help Jesus with some dinner etiquette, so I did aa quick Google search. In August of this year, someone asked Miss Manners for advice: DEAR MISS MANNERS: I find …
Powers and Principalities Then and Now
Jesus encountered constant opposition and criticism for breaking sabbath rules and the taboos of society. In the healing of the woman in Luke 10:10-17, the synagogue leader could not tolerate Jesus healing on the sabbath. He was following the biblical rules that clearly prohibited work on the sabbath. Jesus responded that healing was not …
Blind Spots
Chapter numbers were introduced into the Gospels about a thousand years after they were written. So I like to think of Luke 17:20-19:10 as comprising one unit in the Gospel of Luke, and ignore the division into chapters. This section is the culmination of Jesus' trip to Jerusalem and his fateful encounter with the …
The Logos of Advent
Advent is a time of rich liturgical and popular traditions in the western churches, especially in the Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran churches. But it is a much undeveloped liturgical time in the eastern churches, where it is primarily observed as a fasting season, probably thanks to the disproportionate influence of monastics in the evolution …
The gospel of enough
We live in a time of unbridled greed. There seems to be no limit to how rich a rich person wants to be. And corporations are the greediest persons of all. I call corporations “persons” because that’s what the Supreme Court in its questionable wisdom decided to call them in 2010. When is enough? Today …
Jesus, the Good Samaritan
In recent weeks we have seen a constant stream of allegations of sexual misconduct against prominent men. One of these is Judge Roy Moore who is running to be elected to a Senate seat in a special election in Alabama next month. It's not for political reasons that I mention him. I mention him because …
We are not neutrinos!
On a recent trip to Germany we visited friends in the city Karlsruhe, a typical German city of medium size. I did not know at the time - but found out just days ago - that Karlsruhe is the site of a very important experiment in physics: the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment, Katrin for …
On the Way to Resurrection
Our Gospel reading today is the story of two resurrections. On the way to raise from the dead the daughter of Jairus, Jesus stopped to raise to life a woman who had no life.... Miracles are signs, they are reminders that Jesus is on the way to resurrection, and on the way once in a …
Ancient Answers 