Mark

Have you ever walked and prayed through the Stations of the Cross at a retreat center? Or done a virtual “prayer walk” using the stories and prophecies of Christ’s passion that go with the ancient Sta...

Anointed One, Heal our stingy, selfish ways Silence our accusations End the worship wars The congregation is invited to offer their own prayers of confession silently We remember our faithful sist...

There’s a story told in Soviet Russia during the reign of Joseph Stalin. An elderly woman was praying in a Russian Orthodox Church. Walking to the front of the church, she came to a cross of Jesus and...

[God’s grace is] always hidden under the strangest appearances.

If we do anything to further the kingdom of God, we may expect to find what Christ found on that road - abuse, indifference, injustice, misunderstanding, trouble of some kind. Take it. Why not? To tha...

Context Between the Sending and Return of the Twelve The fate of John the Baptist appears in a Markan ‘sandwich,’ where the story is told almost as a detour between the sending (ἀποστέλλω) of the ...

Mark Rutland humorously recalls a survey asking Americans which words they most long to hear. As expected, the top response was, “ I love you. ” The second was, “ I forgive you .” ...

God of grace, wisdom and hope—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—from whom every family in heaven and on earth gets its true name. You created us in Your image, making us for relationships, giving us meaning...

In this excerpt, the French monastic leader Frere Pierre Marie, shares an interpretation of Jesus as the true prodigal son—bringing all of us home with him: He, who is born not from human stock, or ...

The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.

William James, in a famous letter to H. G. Wells in 1906, credited what he called American “moral flabbiness” to “the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpr...

Risen Jesus, no one saw it coming, but your march out of the tomb has changed everything. This day leaves me breathless in wonder—death is conquered, hope lives, love wins, salvation is here! Give me ...

Fear not, I am the first and the last: I am he that lives forevermore. Now Christ is risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept. Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory thr...

Almighty God, we pray for your blessing on the church in this place. Here may the faithful find salvation, and the careless be awakened. Here may the doubting find faith, and the anxious be encou...

Leader: Jesus knows our every weakness, and loves us still. Awaken to the promise of Christ's amazing grace. Leader: Friends, believe the good news of the gospel. People: In Jesus Christ we are f...

The Parable is a form of speech that has a style all of its own. It is a way of saying something that requires the imaginative participation of the listener. Inconspicuously, even surreptitiously, a p...

We know but little now about the conditions of the life that is to come. But what is certain is that Love must last. God, the Eternal God, is Love. Covet, therefore, that everlasting gift.

The thrust of the parables is to subvert the distorted myths in which people live their lives. To understand what we mean by “living in a myth” just think of a couple of our own contemporary myths. Ta...

The child became a man and the man became a preacher whose sermons were full of commonplace things: seeds and nets, coins and fishes, lilies of the field, and birds of the air. Wherever he was, he had...

“I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”

We are what we love. If we love God, in whose image we were created, we discover ourselves in him and we cannot help being happy: we have already achieved something of the fullness of being for which ...

“And in the end, we were all just humans.. drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.”

God saves by persuasion, not compulsion, for compulsion is no attribute of God.

The motive of grace is the infinite, compassionate love of a merciful God, but the work of grace was the death of Christ on the cross.

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.

Lord, I crawled across the barrenness to you with my empty cup. . . . If only I had known you better, I’d have come running with a bucket.

Faith’s only function is to receive what grace offers.

There is the great lesson of “Beauty and the Beast”; that a thing must be loved before it is loveable.

Context Mark 6 began with Jesus being rejected in his hometown and sending the Twelve on a ‘mission trip.’ At the high point of the disciples’ success, Mark interrupts his narrative to relay the deat...

Context Mark 6 began with Jesus being rejected in his hometown and sending the Twelve on a ‘mission trip.’ At the high point of the disciples’ success, Mark interrupts his narrative to relay the deat...