October 2024 – Wicomico Presbyterian Church

Identity – Who We Are in Christ, Part 3: Shaped by Grace

Colossians 4:2-6 Mark 10:46-52 Sometimes in the movies, and sometimes even in real life, there are critical moments where time slows down. Moments when you notice every second of what you are experiencing, when it feels as though a message is being conveyed to you. The message is: in this moment, everything changes. I have had that feeling about our journey these last few weeks in Chapter 10 of Mark’s gospel. Time slowed down. We have not rushed through it. We have not used the Cliff Notes version of this. We have absorbed every word. Because there is an important message. And everything is about to change. He is drawing near the end of his journey. He is taking his disciples from Galilee, which was home for most of them. It was the sticks, out at the margins of civilization. But now they were leaving Galilee and moving toward Jerusalem. […]

Identity – Who We Are in Christ, Part 2: I Call You Friend

John15:15 Mark 10:35-45 You’re sitting with a friend, and suddenly your friend says, “Look. I need to tell you something but please promise me you won’t be mad.” When your friend says, “promise you won’t be mad,” you know that friend is about to tell you something that is guaranteed to make you mad, right? Same situation here. Jesus’ friends say, “promise you will do for us whatever we ask of you,” because they are about to ask something from him that is really too much to ask. But Jesus plays along. “What do you want,” he asks them. I imagine him grinning at this moment. They say to him, “Give us the best seats in your glory. The throne at your right hand and the throne at your left hand. Please, thank you.” Listen, this is a weird thing for them to ask. Even for these guys who are […]

Identity – Who We Are in Christ, Part 1: You’re Not Going to Believe This

Ephesians 4:31-5:2 Mark 10:17-31 One of my sisters, when she was a very young child used to ask an interesting question. She wondered, “When am I going to turn into a boy?” She never did, actually. But young children can express some funny ideas about their sense of identity. There is a lot of work involved in developing your own sense of who you are, and this was part of the work for my sister when she was four years old. When we grow into adolescence we tend to look to our peers as a means of figuring out who we are. We want to be accepted by them, we want to be liked, and we want to like ourselves. We want to know who we are, and one dimension of that is knowing who we are not. We finished our five-week study on risks we must take for peace […]

A Season of Peace, Week 5: Only Connect

Genesis 2:18-24 Mark 10:2-16 I took my title today from the classic English novel, Howard’s End. It is a story about two families, the Wilcoxes and the Schegels. Two families who wind up in a great dispute about a house, two families whose characters are so different, whose worldviews and values are so different, they have difficulty even understanding one another, let alone coming to a resolution about the house. There is one character in the story who, alone, seems able to bridge the gap. She pleads with the others to find a way to connect the head and the heart, the prose and the passion, the yin and the yang. Only connect the different values and viewpoints. She is a Schegel by birth and a Wilcox by marriage. She stands in the middle of this dispute and pleads, only connect! It is a phrase I have always loved; it […]

A Season of Peace, Week 3: The Risk of Knowing Jesus

James 3:13-4:3,7-8a Mark 9:30-37 I read a newspaper story about a young man named Oliver who had a secret he was so embarrassed about, so humiliated by, that he went to great lengths for many years to keep it hidden. The secret was that he could not read. When he was in first grade he was suspended for a week, and when he returned to school he felt utterly lost, way behind. His home life was difficult, and school was hard, and he said nobody ever talked to him about why school even mattered. Oliver continued to struggle and never caught up. Still, he was promoted from one grade to the next, year after year, until he graduated high school – and still did not know how to read. He went out into the world, looking for a job that wouldn’t require reading skills. He couldn’t read a restaurant menu […]