“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…

In the past weeks, we have become acquainted with many of Jesus’s parables, and we have learned that parables were one of Jesus’s favorite ways of teaching. Instead of telling people what to think, what to believe and what to do, Jesus offered stories with many layers of meaning so people could reflect on their…

What would you say faith is? Sometimes the most simple questions are the most difficult! There is an easy answer though. You could say that every Sunday, after the sermon, we often announce at church that we “confess our faith in the words of the Nicene Creed”, so this is probably what it is, right?…

If you remember from last week, we talked with the Lord’s prayer about the way Jesus used to teach. One of the things we noticed about Jesus’s teaching is that it was simple. Jesus made religion accessible to all the people, even to children. He used everyday language that all could understand. Now we also…

Today we hear in our Gospel the words of what we call the “Lord’s prayer”, the “Our Father”, a prayer that of course most of us know very well. What is really striking to me is the simplicity of this prayer. It’s even more simple in this version of Luke – you may have notice…