Christmas 2006
Mary and Joseph weren’t trying for sainthood, they were trying to survive and to live as a family in an unstable, uncaring world that loved to tear people’s hearts to shreds and bludgeon any signs of hope into dust. While they did not understand their part in the Christmas drama, they were a couple of strong faith and they agreed to parent, to protect, and to nurture a child of hope. They knew that in Jesus’ birth, God was with them.
Sunday, 10 December 2006
John the Baptist was probably not the person most people would choose as their pastor, and he certainly would not stand a chance of getting elected a bishop. John was a poor politician, but a thorough bulldozer of human pride, who caused people to search their souls and turn over their life. He made people uncomfortable. Yet it was John, more than anyone else, who served as Jesus’ mentor and model of a preacher. It was no surprise when Jesus began preaching that Herod and others in high places thought Jesus was John the Baptist who had come back to life.
Sunday, 3 December 2006
The Gospel lesson today, like the Gospels from the past two previous Sundays, is cast in a type of writing that was very common in the ancient world during periods of great upheaval and change. Most commentators believe this and similar passages in the other Gospels are in reaction to the destruction of the Temple and virtually all of Jerusalem by the Roman army in the year 70.
Sunday, 26 November 2006
For his entire ministry, Jesus had announced the coming of God’s new age. By work and deed Jesus made it clear that this new era was not going to perpetuate the boundaries meant to keep people at bay. God wasn’t going to construct or reserve enclosed courtyards where only one type of person could worship, but not others.
Sunday, 19 November 2006
One of the ways we are better to understand the writings of the Bible is to ask, “for what community was this particular book or certain passage written? Why was this book written for them, what questions did it seek to answer and what fears did it set out to alleviate?” Once we are able to formulate some reasonable answers to such questions, often the writings seem more accessible and we are not as apt to read into passages assumptions that were never there.
Sunday, 12 November 2006
The story of the two brothers; the story of Bartemeus, the blind beggar who regained his sight and followed Jesus as a disciple and presumably became a known member of the early church; the poor widow who gave all she possibly could, all reflect a true commitment from the heart. Again, Jesus never tells us how much, Jesus teaches us about heart.
Sunday 5 November 2006
The Gospel is always telling us that no matter who our parents were, no matter our education, no matter what our childhood was like, no matter our age, no matter the state of our health, God can change us. God’s grace has the power to unloose us from all the insidious stuff of the world that holds us down. God unbinds us from the pernicious stranglehold of this world, and frees us to live as part of the body of the living Lord.
Sunday, 29 October 2006
Today the Gospel is asking each of us, what do we really want from Jesus? Do we see Jesus as our personal errand boy or as our Savior? Are we self-absorbed with our own needs or does our insight into Jesus lead us to seek God’s expansive reality? No parish will ever grow if the only question that is asked by its people is primarily framed in terms of “is the church meeting our needs”. Parishes that concentrate on such questions need to get a life, a totally new life!
Sunday, 15 October
It is important for us to understand that Jesus was not simply giving the man a difficult task and saying, in effect, “Once you are successful in this test, you will prove yourself worthy and be let in.” Jesus’ intent was not to make the man the super do-gooder of Judea, so that he would become an example to all the fat cats of the land. Jesus knew how easy it was to delude oneself into thinking one has the means to purchase and even manipulate God’s grace.
Sunday, 8 October
The passage from the Gospel, like the message of Job is deceptively complex, and contrary to a cursory reading, offers no easy answers or judgmental conclusions. The question that was asked of Jesus was really a trap, much like the question of “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar”. If Jesus answered one way it would seem as if he was going against the whole of Jewish tradition, and if he answered the other way the state authorities might have arrested and beheaded him as they recently had done to John the Baptist who had openly condemned the marriage of Herod to his brother’s wife.
Sunday, 1 October
In today’s Gospel the disciples want to restrain someone who apparently is able to successfully exorcise evil spirits, but is not one of their own group. The issue isn’t whether or not the outsider was doing good works in the name of Jesus; the issue was that the outsider was not considered a member of the chosen circle. The disciples wanted to stop the outsider only because he was uncertified and beyond their control and therefore considered insignificant. As Lauren Gough pointed out in her excellent sermon last week, the Gospel warns us against spiritual arrogance, an overemphasis on a narrow definition of authority by contrasting the pettiness of the disciples as opposed to the openness of Jesus.
Sunday, 17 September
Years ago I remember someone said that the snooze alarm is a great symbol of our culture. The alarm goes off, waking us from sleep, announcing a new day, and we press the button, silencing the alarm for another ten minutes and return to sleep. However, the snooze alarm doesn't give us more time, any more than we are able to postpone an appointment with death by running to Melez.
Sunday, 10 September 2006
Just as Jacob received a special blessing that united him once more with his brother Esau, so does the church’s mission to the larger world past and present, receive God’s blessing of reconciliation, but only after debate, soul searching, and wrestling with its implications. Like Jacob, sometimes the church limps for a time after taking God seriously.
Sunday, 3 September 2006
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is confronting a certain group of rabbis who were nitpicking over how the disciples observed particular customs. Jesus never implied that the customs were wrong or that they should be discarded, rather Jesus pointed to their greater purpose.
Sunday, 27 August 2006
In a sense the world is still a lonely place and people are still go hungry. Over two thousand years ago, Jesus gave his disciples an example, a way that would feed the forces of cooperation and sharing, and produce a healthy and promising heritage for the world’s children. Today’s lessons do not minimize the difficulty of this task.
Sunday, 23 July 2006
Most of the people Jesus healed were not famous or influential. They were people like we would meet today standing in line at K-mart or Tops or at the next pump at the gas station. Those whom Jesus touched, those whose lives were changed or whose horizons were widened, found questions welling up naturally within them. “Who is this Jesus? Who is this that has given me new hope, fresh joy, and transformed my life into something so meaningful?" Those who wanted to work out and discover answers to such questions followed him. Then as now, the Holy Spirit works if we give it a chance, not if we force it to go where we would like it to go.
Sunday, 16 July 2006
There were not many mountains that Jesus could hike. Yet Jesus did insist on he and his disciples getting away into the desert and hills. Jesus knew that without balance and perspective, one’s mind was starved. The intensity of our lives needs to be tempered by an understanding that we, and what we make and manipulate, are not the only centers of significance in the universe.
Sunday, 9 July 2006
We don’t have to fear failure; we don’t worship the false god of quick and easy success. Jesus wanted to reach people’s hearts, not play a numbers game. Discipleship implies acknowledgement of the presence of fatal contradictions in the approach the world urges us to take. The Gospel always presents in some way a discontinuity from the past and present; not necessarily a complete rejection, but at least modifications of some consequence.
Sunday, 2 July 2006
This story within the story suggests that a community inevitably exhibits very limited insight insofar as it does not recognize the nameless, the faceless, those without voice, bleeding among them. The woman who suffered humiliation and rejection was as much a daughter of the community as the little daughter of Jairus. Both were in desperate straights. A community that takes its mission seriously must always be open to those heretofore unnoticed or passed over. In such encounters, one meets the face of the Gospel at work, over and over again.
Sunday, 25 June 2006
Perhaps this Gospel passage is warning people of faith today not to be tempted to jump out of the ship and go it alone. The church today may very well be called by the Gospel to set sail and cross boundary areas, where there are dangerous currents and high winds. The journey may very well be bumpy, rough, and make one a little seasick. The territory we are traveling to be not the territory of our past or familiar homeland. We are sailing into a new world. Maybe instead of murmuring against the course and wishing we were back on familiar shore, we need to become more aware and pay attention to where Jesus has set the course.
Sunday, 18 June 2006
It is so tempting to twist the parable of the mustard seed and the parable of the seed growing day and night until the harvest, into a divine guarantee of the inevitability of obvious success. That is to say, if we are persistent enough or wait long enough, everyone will comprehend the unmistakable upward and onward progression of God’s mission.
Sunday, 11 June 2006
Trinity Sunday holds that one picture is not worth a thousand words. For a balanced perspective, you need at the very least, several pictures, and probably some additional words. For example, you don’t begin to get any idea of the depth of the spirit of Abraham Lincoln by looking at one photo of him as a young lawyer or reading one speech he wrote while in Illinois.
Sunday, 4 June 2006
Despite the world's suspicion, God’s grace is for everyone. Salvation has not come for a small clique, or those who adapt to one certain culture, or only those who will think like us. Differing languages, races and cultures have led to terrible misunderstanding and been the excuse for discrimination and inhumanity for centuries.
Sunday 28 May 2006
A lingering sign of most past civilizations seems to be their walls. That is why archeologists spend their time uncovering and defining where the walls were, for that will help them determine where to dig for artifacts.
In some sense Christianity does just the opposite. The Gospel is not about establishing, excavating, or maintaining walls. Rather it is about breaching or destroying walls. Therefore the Ascension is not about Jesus erecting another wall between us, but the fulfillment of the promise to be with us, in all circumstances and places, to the end of time.
Sunday, 21 May 2006
I’m somewhat amused over the fuss the Da Vinci Code seems to be causing among some people. Go see the movie or read the book, but remember it is fiction and does not deal with the truly deeper things of our life. There is no need for the “Da Vinci” Code to shake our faith. The Gospels give testimony to much greater issues and lifts up our horizons to much broader dimensions.
Sunday, 14 May 2006
Today's lesson from the Book of Acts about the baptism of the Ethiopian official follows the baptism of a Samaritan magician named Simon and many of his followers, and precedes the baptism of the gentile Roman soldier Cornelius and his family. The baptismal stories of Acts seem to follow a logical progression. The Samaritans were descendants of the so-called lost tribes of Israel that had intermarried with other peoples when northern Israel was overrun some seven centuries before. While officially scorned by mainstream Jews, they were, nonetheless, closely related to Judaism. They honored and thought that they were the legitimate inheritors of Abraham and Sarah’s blessing. They had their own temple on Mount Gerizim, like the one in Jerusalem.
Sunday, 7 May 2006
When our hearts are heavy and seem to be on the verge of breaking or collapsing, it is helpful to remember that God has a heart larger than even the total of all of ours. When we are infected with jealousy, suspicion, resentment, anger, and disappointment, God is able to deal with that, too, and God’s grace will not fail under the load.
Sunday, 30 April 2006
The Gospel accounts tell us that the weeks following the resurrection became a time when the early disciples became aware of the challenging tasks ahead of them. They realized that Easter would never be simply contained in a flowery message of romantic niceness and bucolic beauty. Discipleship was not going to be as easy as slicing warm butter.
Easter Sunday, 16 April 2006
The original Easter story happened so long ago, yet we are so much like those first disciples. How often we see ourselves in this world as trudging to a cemetery, worrying about who will roll away the stone so that we may bury our dreams and say goodbye to crushed hope.
Palm Sunday, 9 April 2006
The Passion is showing us God incarnate, the paradox of a savoir who could not save, a messiah, the Christ, the anointed one of God, who needed to be and allowed being ministered to. Orthodox Christianity was never embarrassed that Jesus really suffered.
Sunday, 2 April 2006
I suspect Jesus wasn’t so much feared and opposed because of his teaching per se, his barbs at the religious establishment, or his choice of disciples, as much as he was bitterly resented for eating with people of no taste, of not paying attention to the people with the proper credentials, of going after strangers and outsiders rather than sticking to his own extended family, of believing that everyone counted.
Sunday, 19 March 2006
All human societies are in need of being revitalized by God’s grace. Lent reminds us that we need rejuvenation as much as anyone else, even if we all resist it in some way or another. Sometimes exhaustion and spiritual emptiness can sneak up on us as undetectably and unknowingly as carbon monoxide poisoning. When we come up against strangeness or surprise, often our demands for proof, like the expectations of certainty, are really blockades put up against something we don’t want to know.
Sunday, 12 March 2006
How do we help a family torn apart by murder, begin again, like Adam and Eve? How do we aid people for whom their familiar environment has been destroyed, adapt like Noah? How do we help people leave the resentments and sores of old history and tradition behind and construct a new world, like Abraham and Sarah? How do we remain faithful to the Gospel and be the church in a changing world, like the early Christians in Rome? How can humanity be born again after having grown old?
Sunday, 5 March 2006
Noah is a prophet for Lent for he offers wisdom and enlightenment for our age. He listened to God, he was persistent, and bravely began again, venturing forth in a world without the comfortable landmarks. He could have turned bitter and angry, and nurtured resentment for all that he had lost. Instead, he not only built the ark, but when it was time, he was willing to leave the ark too.
Sunday, 26 February 2006
The transition from going from Olympic medallist to former Olympic medallist is frightening and rarely easy. While few of us will ever experience winning an Olympic medal, all of us at some time or another will be presented with circumstances calling for us to acknowledge a profound transition in our lives.
Sunday, 19 February 2006
The Bible is written in metaphoric language, completely different than the empirical language of modern science. Yet in a strange way they do sometimes seem to touch. The Bible, after all, is thoroughly evolutionary. God’s revelation to the people of earth is continually expanded, developed and reworked according to historical circumstances.
Sunday, 12 February 2006
The portrayal of many of the people in the Bible unabashedly touches on various aspects of their humanness. It is not so that we are to necessarily emulate their example, but because there are profound lessons that we are to learn from their example. We are not to conduct our life like King David or King Solomon, but we can certainly draw lessons from their lives.
Sunday, 5 February 2006
We have to be very careful how we understand the healing miracle stories of Jesus. It is so easy to ask how did Jesus do it, what magic words did he use, what prayer did he say, but that is not really the point at all.
Sunday, 29 January 2006
We are sent to proclaim that it is far better to heal and face our fears than to isolate them; that preventing sickness is far better than isolating the sick; that care offers far better dividends than neglect, and that no one is beyond hope or irrevocably separated from God.
Sunday, 22 January 2006
Yet once we understand that God is on our side, rather than a hostile critic, then gifts of the Holy Spirit become easier to accept. God is like a good coach. Good coaches know their teams are not going to win every game. Yet if their teams go into a contest eager to compete, searching for any breaks that may come, they will play better, up to their potential, and even enjoy the contest.
Sunday, 15 January 2006
This weekend, larger society is celebrating the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. It's not merely an individual’s birthday, but the birth of the message of reconciliation, of naming hatred and discrimination as an affront to God’s love. This weekend honors the birth of a vision of a society cleansed from the sin of racism.
Sunday, 8 January 2006
The psalms and prophets contain a multitude of broad images and deep visions. Like all lasting Biblical visions, there is always need for interpretation and continual testing of what such visions mean. That is the primary question for all who take scripture seriously. What do the words mean?