Luke 18:9-34โดย Rev. Chris Currie

Luke 17:1-19 Once we learn that grace is not opposed to effort (action) - though it is opposed to earning (attitude) - the way is open for us to "work out" all that is involved in our salvation, not only "with fear and trembling" but also with the calm assurance that it is God who is at work in us to accomplish all of His goodwill. - Dallas Willard…

Luke 16:13-31 Our deepest life consists in a willed correspondence with the world of the Spirit, and this willed correspondence, which is prayer, is destined to fulfil itself along two main channels; in love towards God and in love towards humanity - two loves which at last and at their highest become one love…. This is not mere pious fluff. This i…

Luke 15:11-32 The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to f…

โดย Rev. Meg Jenista Kuykendall

Luke 14:25-35 The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried. - G. K. Chestertonโดย Paul Burkhart

Luke 14:1-24; Isaiah 55:1-8 The future is given to those who are experienced in groaning. The future is denied to those who have been cynical and calloused and self-deceiving enough to rejoice in the present ordering and are unable to grieve about the ruin toward which the royal community is headed.... The staggering works of Jesus - feeding, heali…

Luke 13:18-35 When we submit our lives to what we read in Scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God's. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves. - Eugene Peterson, Eat This Bookโดย Rev. Chris Currie

Luke 13:1-17 There is mystery in God. If God could be fit into our puny human minds, or limited to our experience of him, or contained in our theological description of his ways, he would be too small a God to worship. - R. Paul Stevens and Michael Green, Living the Story: Biblical Spirituality for Everyday Christians…

Luke 12:35-56 What about those who have strayed from God's path, those whose eyes have veered in idolatrous directions? Are such people simply to die of spiritual thirst in the desert? No, the opposite is true. God uses the wilderness to win many back when they stray. With God, streams of living water appear in the desert. - Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxi…

Luke 12:13-34 Fear is not a Christian habit of mind. - Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Thingsโดย Rev. Chris Currie

Luke 12:1-12 The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work that you most need to do and the world most needs to have done.... Thus, the place God calls you is the place your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. - Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABCโดย Rev. Chris Currie

Luke 11:33-54 “We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on...that’s who we really are.” - J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenixโดย Dr. Cyndi Parker

Luke 11:14-32 The church has always been under call to live differently…. You are not just out there. You have been addressed, claimed, named, commissioned. You have been addressed in your baptism. Every time you take communion, you are called to the extravagant goodness of God, called to put your life down in the power and wonder of the creator Go…

Luke 11:1-13 Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need; prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer. Our wants are for the sake of our coming into communion with God, our eternal need. - George MacDonald, "The Words of Jesus on Prayer," in Unspoken Sermons…

Luke 10:38-42 Stillness before God transforms us into unhurried love. It is in the stillness of silent prayer that God turns over the soil of our hearts, revealing our desires to us and the source of their fullest satisfaction. - Tyler Staton, Praying Like Monks, Living Like Foolsโดย Dr. Cyndi Parker

Luke 10:25-37 "I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us. It can be received gladly or grudgingly, in big gulps or in tiny tastes, like a deer at the salt." - Anne Lamott, Traveling Merciesโดย Dr. Cyndi Parker

1 Peter 2:9-12 When the Church tries to embody the rule of God in the forms of earthly power it may achieve that power, but it is no longer a sign of the kingdom. But when it goes the way the Master went, unmasking and challenging the powers of darkness and bearing in its own life the cost of their onslaught, then there are given to the Church sign…

Luke 9:46-62 "To follow a crucified Messiah is to confess that those who are mighty by the standards of the world are not the ultimate insiders but are likely to be the consummate outsiders in the kingdom of God. Conversely, to be enfolded into the kingdom of the crucified Messiah is to be given the status of consummate insider, even if one was pre…

Luke 9:18-36 A capacity to be thankful in the midst of hard times requires acknowledging that we do not know the whole story, that we are living before it is complete, and that we are thankful for the presence of God and faithful persons in our lives. Gratitude is a crucial way that death and destruction do not have the final word, and cannot fully…

Luke 9:1-20 Baptism takes us to where Jesus is. It takes us therefore into closer neighbourhood with a dark and fallen world, and it takes us into closer neighbourhood with others invited there. The baptized life is characterized by solidarity with those in need, and sharing with all others who believe. And it is characterized by a prayerfulness th…

Acts 2:1-21; Luke 24:44-53 The Spirit is given to begin the work of making God's future real in the present. ... Just as the resurrection of Jesus opened up the unexpected world of God's new creation, so the Spirit comes to us from that new world, the world waiting to be born, the world in which, according to the old prophets, peace and justice wil…

Luke 8:40-56โดย Rev. Chris Currie

Luke 8:22-39 "If God were small enough to be understood, he wouldn't be big enough to be worshipped." - Evelyn Underhillโดย Dr. Cyndi Parker

Luke 8:4-21 "Christian faith isn't a general religious awareness. Nor is it the ability to believe several unlikely propositions. It is certainly not a kind of gullibility which would put us out of touch with any genuine reality. It is the faith which hears the story of Jesus, including the announcement that he is the world's true Lord, and respond…

Luke 7:36-8:3 The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious in God's eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity, and held safe. - Henri Nouwen, Life of the Belovedโดย Rev. Chris Currie

Luke 7:18-35 "The reason I can continue watching and waiting, even as the world is shrouded in darkness, is because the things I long for are not rooted in wishful thinking or religious ritual but are as solid as a stone rolled away." - Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Nightโดย Rev. Chris Currie

Luke 7:1-17 "The best testimony to the truth of the gospel is the quality of our life together. Jesus risked his reputation and the credibility of his story by tying them to how his followers live and care for one another in community.... How we live together is the most persuasive sermon we'll ever get to preach." - Christine Pohl, Living Into Com…

Luke 24:1-12 Perhaps the drama is played out now, and Jesus is safely dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world's history those words might have been spoken with complete conviction, and that was upon the eve of Resurrection. - Dorothy Sayers, "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged"…

Luke 19:28-48 Palm Sunday challenges us to consider whether we have adopted the efficiency of force and cruelty instead of the way of Jesus. Stated differently, Jesus’ life was not just a means of salvation; it was a way of being human. - Esau McCaulley, Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewalโดย Dr. Cyndi Parker

Luke 6:37-42 Only under the gaze of God can we fully and truly accept ourselves.... When we see ourselves with God's eyes, we experience tremendous freedom. It could be called a double-freedom: to be sinners, and to become saints. - Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedomโดย Rev. Chris Currie

Luke 6:27-36 We are sowing the seed of love, and we are not living in the harvest time. We must love to the point of folly, and we are indeed fools, as our Lord Himself was, who died for such a one as this. - Dorothy Day, Called to Community: The Life Jesus Wants for His Peopleโดย Dr. Cyndi Parker

Luke 6:17-26 Never soul was set free without being made to feel its slavery; nothing but itself can enslave a soul, nothing without itself free it. - George MacDonald, "The Hardness of the Way," in Unspoken Sermonsโดย Paul Burkhart

Luke 6:1-11 "I do not know You God because I am in the way." - Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journalโดย Rev. Chris Currie

Luke 5:27-39 Turn and leave your life behind. More beautiful words have never been spoken. My passage through seconds, minutes, and hours could hardly be called life. Enticing. Those words waft toward me like smells from Mom's kitchen. They drift toward me supremely, like the love from Coltrane's saxophone. I realize that those words, follow me, ar…

Isaiah 6:1–8; Luke 5:1-26 The gospel imperative for the church is not simply the call to a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. In that way of expressing the gospel message, a radically individualistic emphasis overwhelms the definition of what it means to be a Christian. While no one would argue against the idea that the Lord saves…

Luke 4:31-44 The blueprint of the household of God looks nothing like the blueprints of our own cultural and social cliques. If we want to know how to embody the household of God, we need look no further than to Jesus. While on earth, Jesus modeled this new reality by connecting with every type of person around - conservative theologians, liberal t…

Luke 4:16-30 Many and varied are the interpretations dealing with the teachings and life of Jesus of Nazareth. But few of these interpretations deal with what the teachings and life of Jesus have to say to those who stand, at a moment in human history, with their backs against the wall.... This is a matter of tremendous significance, for it reveals…

Luke 4:1-15 (formatted as poetry) There is not a place in this world where I am not asked to prove it./ Substantiate my belonging./ Verify that my body is qualified to occupy this space,/ as if the miracle of my enfleshment weren't enough./ But I am asked to be superhuman. Divine even. More than mediocre,/ like the rest of them,/ to demonstrate tha…

Luke 3:19-38 No person we meet from the moment we open our eyes in the morning till we shut them in sleep at night is finished. Each person is a tragic-comic soul whom God is saving. Implicit in every personal name (explicit in baptism) is the Holy Trinity, that intricate coming into being of persons-in-relationship in a not-to-be-fathomed eternity…

Luke 3:1-18 "[John the Baptist’s message] is not good news in the sense that it will make everybody happy. It is not good news in the sense that whatever evil and injustice people have committed and still commit is no longer important. It is good news in the sense that a new reality is dawning. Thanks to the one whose coming John announces, evil an…

Luke 2:41-52 Spiritual transformation is not about behavior modification. It is about changing the sources of behavior, so the behavior will take care of itself. When the mind is right and the heart is right and the body and the soul and the relationships that we have in our social world are right, the whole person simply steps into the way of Chri…

Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12 That hidden thing calling me on to the chase is the very thing that puts me in my place. It is at once invitation and caution—a burning bush beckoning and a warning that I’ve ventured onto holy ground... - Joshua Stamper, "Proverb"โดย Dr. Cyndi Parker

Luke 2:21-38 This is what Christmas is all about - something radically new that cannot be generated out of the conditions of this world. It does not emerge. It comes. We do not extrapolate it. God promises it. If darkness has descended upon you and your world, you need not try to persuade yourself that things are not as bad as they seem or to searc…

โดย Dr. Cyndi Parker

Luke 1:26-38 "The Advent season should come as a reminder to us that we can never be, and should not be, adjusted to the world. We are here to proclaim the reality and the imminence of a wholly other world, a world in which different powers rule and different standards operate. We are here to make it possible for ordinary men and women really to be…

Luke 1:1-25 "Before Advent is a word, it is a sigh. A voice crying. A mood. And never more deeply felt than in these troubled months. Advent marks both the exhaustion and the hope of God’s people, when the meaning of our lives is expressed in a weary exhalation of ordinary breath and then a sharp intake of something greater." - Richard Lischer, "Ad…

Rev 22:1-21 That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, …

Rev 21:1-27 "[I]t is the very transcendence of God - in the ascension of the Son who now reigns from heaven, and in the futurity of the coming kingdom for which we pray - that disciplines and disrupts and haunts our tendency to settle for 'this world.' It is the call of the Son from heaven, and the vision of the new Jerusalem descending from heaven…

Rev 20:1-15 "For believers, the last judgment is not so much a process by which the moral quality of human deeds is made unmistakably manifest and appropriate rewards and punishments apportioned, but rather, and above all, an event in which sinners are forgiven and justified. Christ the final judge is none other than Christ the merciful savior." - …