Isaiah 25:6-9 John 11:32-44 Not long ago in our Tuesday Bible Study we discussed a text from the book of Ezra in which the people of Israel are gathering at the site of the new temple. The young ones cheer for joy and the old ones cry. And the cheers were loud and the weeping was loud, and you couldn’t make out the crying from the shouting because it was all mixed up together. Sort of like a school playground during kindergarten recess. And we mused about why the old ones were crying. Possibly because they felt a fresh wave of grief over the loss of the old temple, and all the loss that had gone with it. But it’s also possible their tears were expressions of joy and gratitude, because they were given a chance to begin again. Tears can have many meanings. Quite likely, these tears were a mixture […]
Continue readingMonth: October 2018
The Benefits of Membership
Mark 10:35-45 I was thinking of my old friend Bill this past week. He died a couple of years ago at the age of 82. I first met him when he invited me to join him and his wife to a dinner theatre performance of The Sound of Music. He picked me up in his Buick. We talked about cars. Bill was an avid member of the Buick Club of America. I never knew there was a Buick Club until I met Bill. He was very enthusiastic about it. He went to Buick meets, joined in with Buick Club tours whenever he could. Bill had a barn on his property which held a variety of Buicks, so part of the fun was deciding which one to drive when he went to Buick Club events. The Buick Club was not his whole life, though. He was also a Free Mason, and […]
Continue readingReceiving the Kingdom
Mark 10:2-16 My friend Rachel was married when I first met her – and I thought her marriage was divinely happy. It looked like that from the outside. But it became awfully clear one day that this was not such a happy marriage, when Tom announced to her that he was planning to file for divorce. He did not love her anymore, he said, if he ever really had loved her in the first place. Rachel was heartbroken for a long time. This was an independent, intelligent, highly capable woman, but now it was like her whole life had fallen apart. Everything that she had believed and valued about her life was now in question. In our conversations during that period, she acknowledged that, yes, the marriage had been troubled but she had not wanted to accept that the troubles were that threatening. She had not wanted to believe it. Now, she had to accept it […]
Continue readingStumbling Blocks
James 5:13-20 Mark 9:38-50 I just heard about the new words that have been added to the Scrabble dictionary this year. Among them is “ew.” I like that. I mean, I don’t like the word, but I am amused that it is now something you can play in Scrabble. Ew, the sound you make when the milk has gone bad; what you say when your kid eats his boogers. My spell-checker still doesn’t know it’s a legitimate word – every time I type it the angry red squiggle lines appears underneath, warning me that I have made a faux pas. But it’s real now, it’s okay to say ew. The word, ew, will forever and always remind me of the 18-year-old woman in Texas who asked me what I was studying at the university, and when I told her I was working on a PhD she said “ew.” As in, […]
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