A friend told me she once preached about discipleship. After the service, a parishioner came up to her and said, irately, “I am not a disciple. I am a member.” Oh well, I guess it was better than no reaction at all, and certainly better than, “Lovely sermon.”

I do not consider myself “a person of faith.” There, I said it. Are you shocked? 

Yes, I attend my parish church regularly. I say the creed without crossing my fingers. I renew my baptismal vows at least once a year. So what could it possibly mean to say I am not “a person of faith”?

I remember seminary students who were hoping to be ordained warning one another of the kind of questions they were likely to be asked in the selection process. “It used to be,” they said, “that you had to say something about the importance of the sacraments.

As a scholar of ancient Hebrew, I have spent decades puzzling about how best to translate the first two verses of the Bible into English. Finally, I have settled on the following:

"What is the best Bible translation?"

As a biblical scholar, I am asked this question more than any other.

"What is the best Bible translation?"

As a biblical scholar, I am asked this question more than any other.

The process of developing a sermon by drawing meaning out of a biblical text (also known as exegesis) does not have to be complicated.

My family and I live in a Victorian house in downtown Toronto. One of the things that drew us to buy this old home was the entrance, which consists of two nicely sculpted wooden doors with stained glass panels that make up the upper half of each door.

Christians familiar with liturgical traditions will know that we are in the season of Epiphany, a period that focuses on Bible passages that disclose the fact that Jesus was divine.