I am struck by how similar Hannah’s prayer is to Miriam’s at the Red Sea and to Mary’s Magnificat. All three are hymns about God’s great, almost comic reversal of the order of things: the lowly have been lifted up and the mighty brought low.

I was talking to a fri....

I confess it: I like to know how things work, almost too much for my own good. I come from a fix-it family and started taking things apart and putting them back together from an early age. That’s good for some pursuits, and I am glad to be generally curious, but why or how or when are sometimes qu....

Jesus lived in a man’s world. In the culture of Jesus’ time women occupied a relatively invisible position, so it is significant that they are intentionally written about in the story. They are his providers! Mary is the first to see the risen Lord, and for the first few centuries she was called....

Authority is a tricky thing. We need it, and we chafe under it. It is one of the hardest things to hold and one of the hardest things to give away.

When I was working in a church, my then-mentor gave me a tool that will never leave me. He said, “the deacon’s primary wo....

For several years this was my favorite psalm passage. I was in college and trying to find my way as a young adult, and this particular promise spoke particularly powerfully to me: that even when I was at my most confused or least trusting—even when I could see nothing of God—still God was someho....

He never names it, but the apostle Paul had some perceived defect that was so large he made it the center of his identity, and he essentially admits that he would have been an intolerable person to be around without its humbling effect.

But Paul doesn’t create a victim i....

What are you most proud of about yourself? Your looks? Your career? Your accomplished child? Your personality?

Everybody has things they are justifiably proud of, things that they take pleasure in, things that help them identify their worth. Even the apostle Paul, in an in....

Today we celebrate the Feast of Saint Barnabas, one of the missionaries from the “golden age” of the church’s first expansion. I put those words in quotation marks, because from the perspective of those living in those days they were not as golden as they appear from another century. For those....

God’s promise of blessing for good behavior is a comforting feature of religion, but it’s only one end of a spectrum of God’s relationship with us.

At the other end of the spectrum is Jesus, whose teaching most of the time turns religious conventional wisdom on its ....

Somewhere years back I heard a firebrand preacher give a sermon that has stayed with me. Titled “The Death of a Vision,” its thesis was that for a vision to come to its fullness, it had at some point to effectively collapse as a possibility, so that whatever was then reborn could be truly God’....

When I was younger I listened to my grandparents tell stories of finding creative ways to make it through the Great Depression. Frugality when times are tight can be a good thing, but it can also create a pinched character that misses an important universal and gospel principle: generosity begets ge....

These are times when some people feel that the bounty of the whole is not adequately shared. As I write, the rage of the Occupy Wall Street protest swirls in the air, as people give voice to the deep frustration that extreme profit is being made on the backs of others, not by hard work but by a rigg....

Some things, when given away, produce more of themselves. Most of the positive human emotions (and I suppose the negative ones as well) fall into that category. Love, respect, generosity. We can hoard those, feeling like we do not get enough of them as it is, without realizing that giving them away ....

When I was a boy the idea of the rapture terrified me. There would come a day, I was told, when everything would be upended on earth—so you wouldn't want to be left behind, would you? I lived with a low-grade anxiety of the unknown-but-imminent, even though I had done all the right stuff to be....

This is often Jesus’ refrain: your faith has made you well. Some kind of chemical reaction takes place here, where people’s faith activates the power of God—or God’s power activates faith—and healing happens.

While we tend to read miracles like this as magic even....

We don’t know why the disciples wanted their faith increased. There might be many reasons, the ugliest of which is a “show of faith.” Turn on the TV and you will see what I mean. There are preachers galore who have made a handsome profit off faith-building—usually a lot of it invested in the....

I think back to my Sunday school years in a Bible church and to the gospel as I learned it then. So much of what I received I still treasure, and some of it I have discarded. In fact, to some of my then-mentors I now seem to be preaching another gospel.

But I would say it�....

Something curious about religion—but one of its most abiding features—is how it expresses both our desire to get close to God and our desire to keep our distance. There is always that desire to have the light but not the heat of the flame of God. The children of Israel say so in this core story ....

I love this story of the two kinswomen sharing their expectancy and joy. One had been barren, the other is an unmarried maiden. Both are pregnant. A third character is the baby John, yet unborn, leaping in his mother’s womb. The story always takes me back to my own pregnancies, when the baby kicke....

Next to guidance counselors and teachers, we religious ministers may be the people most frequently asked to write recommendation letters to schools, colleges, or special programs. People seem to think that we are good sources of information—or maybe they just think we’ve seen folks at their best....