

What Can Legally Blonde Teach Us About the Cross?
A sermon on Mark 8:27-38 [For an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash]. [I am going to being this sermon in kind of a weird place, but just go with it. It will tie in, I promise.] Thanks to a child whose musical preference leans almost exclusively to Broadway soundtracks, I was recently introduced to Legally Blonde: The Musical. I never happened to see the original movie, so I was only familiar with the vaguest outline of the plot: a


On Tradition, Hypocrites, and Newness
A sermon on Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23, Song of Songs 2:8-13 [for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Tamara Gak on Unsplash] Is it just me, or is the confrontation that is the focus of today’s gospel story both familiar and surprising? The familiarity comes from how quickly a disagreement about an “issue” devolves into more personal attacks. This is the pattern in our historical moment’s all-or-nothing culture of disagreement: It seems that we are never ONL