Today, we have one of these passages of the Gospel that is important to hear with a little bit of historical background. Now I know what some may think when we say that: Oh, she is going to tell us not to read it literally but to understand all of this as symbols. And that’s…

Because that’s the best week to do that, let me start by telling you a story that is a little spooky. One day in Iceland, a young woman “au pair” was taking a walk with the little girl she was in charge of. On their way, they saw a church from afar and the little…

By now, we probably know everything we need to know about tax collectors! If you remember from last week, our Gospel was “The parable of the pharisee and the tax collector praying in the Temple“. We talked extensively about the reasons why tax collectors at Jesus’s time were considered as sinners and how they were…

Today, we have another parable with a couple of characters that seem to be complete opposite: The pharisee and the tax collector. This is not the first time we find a couple of opposite characters in Luke’s Gospel: you probably remember the unjust judge and the widow last week, and recently, we also talked about…

“Do your prayers work?” This question is the question I have been asked the most consistently throughout my ministry. I was prepared to answer all kind of questions: “How do we know that God is real?”, “Did Jesus really exist?”, “How can we prove the Resurrection?”, but the thing is I was never asked any…

The Gospel we have just heard this morning, the healing of the ten lepers, is not one of the most well-known and it’s a passage that can also be a little difficult for us to understand: We don’t know much about the disease of leprosy and we are not very familiar with the customs of…

It’s interesting because last week we were in the first part of this chapter 16 of Luke, and we had a parable that seemed difficult to understand – if you remember, it was the story of the “dishonest manager”. Today, we continue in this chapter 16, the second half of the chapter, and Jesus remains…

Before we have a look at another new parable for this Sunday, it would be helpful I think to take a little time with our first reading, this short passage from the book of Amos. If you don’t know Amos, he was a prophet who lived in the 8th century before Christ, and he preached…

By now, we are quite familiar with the notion that Jesus told parables to help people think about their lives. Rather than giving people instructions, Jesus asked them questions so they could change their mind about a certain number of things, a certain number of people, and even change their minds about God. In the…

There are a few sayings in the Gospel known as the “difficult words of Jesus” and we certainly encounter some of them today in the first verses of our passage. Jesus says to the crowd: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brother and sisters, yes, and even…