For four weeks in a row, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians shows up in our lectionary, starting this Sunday. We have four weeks because there are four chapters in the letter, and the lectionary assigns an extract of each chapter to each week. Now the lectionary also gives liturgical teams the option to lengthen a…

This section of the Gospel from which we have read this morning (Chap.18) is known as Jesus’s instructions on “Church discipline”. So it does not sound like a lot of fun, and on top of that, it does not seem to make much sense with what have been talking about in those two past weeks:…

Barbara Brown Taylor is a famous preacher and one of the things she says is that she hates to have to preach on suffering because she always worries that “God is going to put [her] to the test on what she has just said”. This is meant as a joke of course but, as it…

I couldn’t be happier with the Gospel we have just heard this morning because I think this is the perfect place for us to start our class on “how to share our faith with others” with Mark Mittleberg’s book. The passage of the Gospel we have just heard is known as “Peter’s confession”(as in “Confession…

The Gospel we have heard this morning may sound a little bit confusing (at least it sounded a bit confusing to me when I first read it!) and I think there are two reasons for it that we will need to unpack: One reason of contents, one reason of form. – As for the contents,…

Well I don’t know about you but, so far, I didn’t like Jacob very much. It’s interesting isn’t it how often in the Bible we meet some characters that aren’t that likable, and not only the villains but also those who are supposed to be the good guys. Jacob later renamed “Israel”, father of twelve…

If you’re starting to wonder whether you have heard this same passage of the Gospel last week, it means that you have been paying attention! The passage we have read last week was indeed quite similar to the one we have today, both in form and in content: Jesus tells the story of a sower…

The story of Jacob and Esau has always sounded quite disturbing to me. I remember thinking as a kid: Why would Esau do something that stupid? I imagine that at the time, if I could easily relate to the idea that my sister would try to exchange something I cherished for something of lesser value,…

I am afraid I am going to repeat myself because I have often mentioned that the Book of Genesis was written during the Exile, when the Jews were living in captivity in Babylon, after they had lost their land, their city and their temple. We have already talked about how putting their stories into writing…

This Sunday again we have heard a difficult passage of the Gospel…What I think we need to have in mind though is that it is a difficult Gospel because it is a Gospel for difficult times. The passage picks up where we left off last week, let’s remember that what Jesus is doing is that…