I regularly wish I could have a conversation with the framers of the revised common lectionary. I am so curious why they made the choices they did about what texts we read any given Sunday morning. Sometimes I want to know why they skipped certain passages, sometimes I begrudgingly acknowledge their wisdom in avoiding challenging texts that need far more than ten to twelve minutes to unpack, sometimes I lament that preachers have to talk about bread for seven weeks in a row.

In the way our lectionary is presented to us, the Gospel reading seems a bit strange. It begins with the disciples’ request to increase their faith, which leads to a bizarre response from Jesus about a mulberry bush, and then ends with an analogy of obedience. To keep these verses in isolation, without reference to the larger narrative, we risk a great deal of misunderstanding – with regard to both the disciples’ request and to Jesus’ response.

Luke speaks a great deal about wealth and possessions in his account of the Gospel. The categories of rich and poor are employed regularly in Luke’s vision of the Great Reversal inaugurated by the coming of God’s reign. Mary’s Song sings of God filling the hungry with good things while sending the rich away empty.

God weeps. Statements like this make many bible scholars and theologians very uncomfortable. It’s almost funny how much ink scholars have spent attempting to convince each other that clearly this is Jeremiah speaking and not God. But at the end of the day, the text is ambiguous. It could be Jeremiah’s voice we hear, but it could just as easily be God continuing to speak from earlier, or it could be a mingling of the voices of both Jeremiah and God, distraught over the path their people are taking.

This last week, I was in Portland with students and faculty from Church Divinity School of the Pacific. We were there for an intensive gathered session with three and a half hours of class time in the morning, two and half hours of class time in the afternoon, interspersed with prayer and worship and meals. On Wednesday, as we left our morning classes, many of us opened our phones to the news that had begun to spread of another high school shooting and of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Today marks our first Sunday observing the session of creation. This is a short liturgical season meant to draw us into reflecting on God's relationship with creation as well as our own relationship with the more than human world.

But before we begin to explore those themes, we need to take a minute to unpack this gospel reading. This is no tender image of Jesus, no “let the little children come to me” moment. Jesus sounds downright harsh.

“Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.”

The prophet Jeremiah has not been given a gentle word to prophesy.

We don’t really know much about the woman in our Gospel reading today. We don’t know her name, or where she comes from. We don’t even know why she appeared, “just then,” in the synagogue on the Sabbath day that Jesus was there teaching. All we know is that for 18 years, she had been crippled by a spirit, “bent over and quite unable to stand up.” I wonder if you can imagine the scene …

Once upon a time… no wait… at the beginning of time … or In a time already long past, when it was still of use to cast a spell...no, let me try again…long ago, long ago…or is it there was or there was not—is anything sure or certain but the greatness of Allah?—a king so powerful that man and Djinn bowed before him.

In the context of Luke’s gospel, our passage today comes on heels of Jesus’ exhortation to his disciples to guard against the fears and anxieties of this life in light of the ultimate concerns of the coming kingdom of God.

Well hello there! It’s lovely to see some familiar faces, and I look forward to growing more familiar with each of your faces. As we’ve said this morning, I’m Father McKenzi and this is my first Sunday serving as your curate, which means I am serving as a priest under the close mentorship of Reverend Nat.

Lord, teach us to pray. At the core of our identity as Christians, we are a people called to pray. Luke provides us with this teaching through explicit and implicit means throughout his gospel.

From Luke’s gospel alone, we don’t know much about Mary and Martha. He doesn’t give us much background, and the sisters don’t appear again in his writings.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is probably one of the most well-known of Jesus’ parables. Even those who have never stepped foot inside of a church can likely tell you the gist of it.

In our Gospel reading this morning, we hear about a second commissioning of Jesus’ disciples to go into the villages that Jesus intended to visit and prepare them for his arrival. Luke is the only gospel writer to give us this story.