17th Sunday after Pentecost (10/5/25): Lk 17:5-10 This week’s blog will be brief, as the next two Sundays call on texts in Lk 17 which I don’t really exposit in HARP. However, the RCL gospel for this week has a key connection to Luke’s narrative of Sabbath Economics. The famous “mustard seed faith” saying promises…
16th Sunday after Pentecost (9/28/25): (Lk 16:19-31) Ten years ago, our Communications Coordinator Chris Wight taught me the acronym “TL;DR”—“too long; didn’t read.” As a writer who tends toward (and is admittedly constrained by) longer-form reflection, I’ve always found that a bit snarky. But I also understand that in a world inundated by all manner…
15th Sunday after Pentecost (9/21/25): (Lk 16:1-14) First things first. Bill Johnson, Baptist servant leader, friend, and loving spouse of our board member Carter Echols (right), passed away on Sept 13. His short time of hospice brought a gracious end to their brave decade-long struggle with Bill’s cancer. Please hold their family in God’s Light…
In the wake of the challenging teachings of chapter 14, Luke’s story resets, with Jesus’s audience increasingly polarized between “tax collectors and sinners coming near to listen” and “Pharisees and scribes grumbling”
The tension introduced in the first three parts of this exploration are “resolved” in the fourth, which I examine here, looking at Luke’s repeated key phrases: “those who were invited” and “the poor, disabled and blind”, which represent the “flipped script” of the parable.
This entire sequence of Luke 14:1-24, taken whole, turns the world of prestige upside down, and invites us to examine just how we all tend to play, aspire to play, or tolerate social games of ladder-climbing.
Two Political Bodies Symbolizing the Disease of Disparity in the Body Politic Lk 13:10-17, 14:1-6
Lk 12:49-56 is a bit of a head scratcher, at least from a narrative point of view. But it is part of the final section of an extended teaching cycle—the longest uninterrupted discursive series in the Third Gospel.
This week I am commenting on Lk 12:22-34, a keystone teaching that has been marginalized in the lectionary (Sunday’s RCL gospel is 12:32-40). By skipping over it, the RCL cuts out the heart of Jesus argument following on the 8th Sunday’s story of the rich farmer.
8th Sunday after Pentecost As we turn the corner into August, the RCL commences selections from the Third Gospel’s “Special Section,” which contains mostly unique Lukan material, which in turn illuminate his focus on Sabbath Economics. The backbone of this third of the narrative is a series of “rich man stories” (right), beginning with our…