From the Margins: A Sufferer Luke 8:26-39 All week as I’ve been reading this passage I keep thinking about a children’s storybook.  This is not my typical go-to theological reference, as you know. Maybe it’s because we’ve been thinking about the littlest ones among us a lot around here these days as we watch our nursery grow, as we prepared for a weekend of Vacation Bible School out at Camp Fraser (winding… Read More

  a meditation on Matthew 13:1-9 Listen. Balancing on the deck of a boat, removed because the crowds are too thick, he launches his words to float above the frenzied group. Toward the shore the people gather: a large, anonymous mass straining to hear.  They are blended into comfortable ambiguity, a vaporized distinction of each precious and fragile life. The teeming crowd: a safe place to hide. But even anonymity cannot camouflage… Read More

From the Margins: A Sad Mother Luke 7:11-17 Last week we began a conversation about the lectionary Gospel passages these next few weeks, which are stories about Jesus and his ministry that give us front row seats at interactions he has with people on the margins of society. As we heard last week in the story of the Roman centurion whose slave Jesus healed, marginalized are not necessarily people without position or… Read More