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By Matthew L. Skinner

  By Barbara Kay Lundblad What is the text for this Sunday, September 11?  The minister may read a text from the Bible but many people will be hearing other texts that aren’t in the book: the reading of names, the melancholy drone of bagpipes, a final goodbye left on an answering machine. Some of…

  By Mark G. Vitalis Hoffman   Matthew 18:15-20is an insider’s text for outsiders. From Matthew’s perspective, Jesus is both warning and assuring those inside the young Christian church. It is a church, however, whose members stand outside the main streams of both religious and civil practice. For Christians today reading it as insiders, the…

By Greg Carey Matthew 16:21-28 confronts us with the gap between Jesus’ gruesome fate and our own modest discipleship.  Jesus’ verbs say it all.  Deny the self, take up the cross, follow Christ.  Moreover, only in losing one’s life – the primary meaning of apollymi is to destroy – one may save it.  And Jesus apparently…

By Eric D. Barreto Had fear prevailed, we would not know the name “Moses” today. Had Pharaoh triumphed, the story of God’s liberation of God’s enslaved people could not be told. Had a number of women not acted out of compassion and courage, the extermination of a people would have been sharply felt by them…

By Barbara Kay Lundblad This story in Matthew 15 is very troubling. A Canaanite woman cries out to Jesus to heal her daughter. By the end of the story, her daughter has been healed — but between the crying and the healing, Jesus says some terrible things. He’s arrogant, racist and just plain mean. We…

By Matthew L. Skinner In Matthew’s Gospel, the story of Jesus walking on water morphs into a story of Peter walking on, then sinking into, the same water. It begins as a statement about Jesus’ authority; for Jesus’ contemporaries had learned from scripture that such mastery over the waters is God’s accomplishment. When Peter tells…
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