The first story in our series of “Following a Trail of Bread Crumbs” is the Passover story of unleavened bread. It is bread meant to be eaten in a posture of being ready for God’s great liberative act.

Two fundamentally dispositions about others are scribed out by the biblical texts, one of which says, “Whoever is not for us is against us,” and the other says, “Whoever is not against us is for us.” The second offers us a disposition of openness and Christlikeness.

They say “Silence is golden,” but when the disciples have nothing to say as Jesus asks, “What were you talking about along the road?” it was the silence of shame. They had been arguing over who was the greatest. It raises the question, “What have we been talking about along the road?” Our greatness or […]

When Jesus discloses his journey to the cross for the first time, Peter takes him aside and rebukes him in order to silence him. Jesus’ response is withering, because Peter is determined to make Jesus a great Caesar-like Messiah, instead of a victim of the cross.

Gregory of Nyssa once said, “Sin the failure to grow.” When Jesus is confronted by a Syro-Phoenician woman, his cultural box has a chance to be enlarged. And, with her insistence, Jesus grows.

In the last of our series on the Ten Words for Liberated People, we hear the command, “You shall not covet.” It is the one command that we all violate regularly, and typically do not see the problem. But, if desire is the source of our discontent, salvation is all about the transformation of desire.

A Meditation given by St. Mark Youth, reflecting on their recent trip to Urban Youth Mission in Chicago.

While Jesus summarized all of the law and prophets with the 3-fold love of God, neighbor, and self, the “love” itself is never commanded while sexuality shows up in both the 8th and 10th commands. As Paul Ricoeur once famously put it, “Sexuality is the domain of all the difficulties.”

The 6th Command, “You shall not murder,” seems the most easily understood and easily kept of all of the commandments. But, there’s far more to it than meets the eye, starting with Moses himself as both a survivor of a kill order and a murderer himself. The prohibition draws us to the positive statement of […]