Are you salty?

Please read Mark 9: 38-50

Mark 9 is such a fun chapter to study and offers several great preaching stops along the way. This passage, the Lectionary Gospel Reading for Sunday, September 26, 2021, does not fail to challenge the hearer or the preacher/reader. The text picks up from last week’s Gospel reading where we are reminded of the importance of children in Jesus’ eyes. While this may not seem very unusual to us, our sense of the role of children is different than in ancient culture. Scholars suggest that “children were …often viewed as liminal beings. As not fully-human they were seen as beings on the threshold of another world….”1 This makes Jesus’ comments even more avant-garde and challenging to the...continue reading