Mark 8:27-38 I have a small collection of crosses in my office, made of a variety of different kinds of material – wire, ceramic, clay, wood, glass. There is one that is a souvenir from Sacre Coeur Basilica in Paris; one is a souvenir from Mo-Ranch, the Presbyterian conference center in the Texas Hill Country. One was given to me by a man I met at a youth workcamp; he carved them out of purple heart wood and gave one to each of the chaperones. I have one that I made out of pieces of cut glass fused together. They are all beautiful. To say the cross is beautiful – this is something no one would have said back in the first century. We have mostly forgotten that the cross was an instrument of torture, a gruesome form of capital punishment. The cross doesn’t have the same impact today as […]
Continue readingAuthor: Maggie Gillespie
Learning Compassion
Mark 7:24-37 So Jesus is on his way to Tyre, but he is coming from Galilee where he has been trolled, you might say, by Pharisees. They have been following him around, apparently looking for opportunities to criticize him. Of course, they found one: uncouth table habits. Apparently, they didn’t wash their hands before eating. No doubt, they ate with their hands, so it is a little bit gross. But it was not so much hygiene that the Pharisees are worried about, it’s protocol. Their chief complaint is that Jesus and his disciples don’t follow the tradition of the elders, a ritual hand washing. I don’t know if Jesus had a beef with this particular tradition. But what bugs him is their hypocrisy. The way they abandon the commandment of God andhold on to human tradition. God did not say, “wash your hands.” That was your mother. So, while washing your hands is […]
Continue readingNo Longer Strangers, Part 6: Suiting Up
Joshua 24:1-2, 14-18 Ephesians 6:10-20 Anyone know what Charlie Sheen is up to these days? Some years ago, you might recall, he had a spectacularly public breakdown. Although, not if you asked him. If you asked Charlie he would have said, “Winning!” because that became his mantra. When asked about his diagnosis of bipolar disorder, he said, “Not bipolar. It’s bi-winning! Winning here, winning there…” His conversations were colored with staccato bursts of “winning!” It appeared to be a kind of game – a mind game, where the object is saying it enough times in the hope that will make it true, talking oneself into believing it despite the clear reality. Winning! He started something, didn’t he? Winning is big. Winning is huge. #winning. Winning at life. Winning so much we get bored with winning. So. Much. Winning. It might get boring, but it has to be about winning, because […]
Continue readingNo Longer Strangers, Part 5: Overflowing Life
Ephesians 5:15-20 Time is something we think about often enough. We have a popular saying: Life is too short. Too short for what? Life is too short to be sad, to hold grudges, to not celebrate. Life is too short to worry. Life is too short to be on a diet, to live on low-fat everything, to forgo cake and champagne or any of the good stuff! Life is too short to stay in a bad job, a bad relationship, or to live a lie. Life is too short for a long story, life is too short to talk slowly, life is too short to waste a minute of it. In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Clearly, there is a wide range of ideas about what life ought to be […]
Continue readingNo Longer Strangers, Part 4: Making Peace
Ephesians 4:25-5:2 On a Saturday afternoon recently, Kim and I were listening to Harry Chapin’s music while we were working around the house. When the song, Cat’s in the Cradle, came on we both stopped what we were doing and just listened. It’s one of his most famous songs. It tells the story of a father who has a son. It starts out: A child was born just the other day, He came to the world in the usual way, But there were planes to catch and bills to pay, He learned to walk while I was away. He was talking before I knew it, and as he grew he said, “I’m gonna be like you, dad. You know I’m gonna be like you. And the song goes on like that; in each verse, a different stage in the child’s development presents opportunities that are missed by this father, to […]
Continue readingNo Longer Strangers, Part 3: God’s Powerful Love
Ephesians 3:14-21 I have an app on my phone called Ceaseless. Every morning at 8:00 it pings me and asks me if I would like to pray. Sometimes I say, “later.” And that is okay, because it is always there for me. It gives me focus for my prayers. Each day this app randomly pulls three people in my contact files and suggests I pray for them. I never know whose name will pop up. So it happens, sometimes, that it is the name of a person I am angry with. Or it may be the name of someone I am deeply concerned about or anxious for. It could be someone I haven’t thought about in ages, someone I’ve lost touch with and I have no idea what is going on in their lives. And Ceaseless asks me to pray for them. Sometimes, though, I don’t know how to pray […]
Continue readingNo Longer Strangers, Part 2: Aliens Brought Near
Ephesians 2:11-22 In 1871 two archeologists found a piece of engraved stone from the Jerusalem temple with Greek writing on it. It held a stern warning: “No foreigner is to enter the barriers surrounding the sanctuary. He who is caught will have himself to blame for his death which will follow.” This was one rule they were, evidently, pretty strict about. No gentiles were permitted to enter the temple. But it was not the only rule. There were degrees of acceptability in the temple worship of the time. The outermost area of the temple was called the court of the gentiles, and it was a large, open, public area. Anyone could come into the outer court. But within this courtyard there was a barrier, called a soreg, which surrounded a wall defining the perimeter of the outer court of the temple. The outer court was also called the court of the […]
Continue readingNo Longer Strangers, Part 1: The Family
Ephesians 1:3-14 This week we begin a new series focusing on Christian community. Using the letter to Ephesians to explore this basic question: how to live as a community of faith in the best ways we can. The church has changed an awful lot over the past 2000 years, but something that has not really changed is the struggle we have to be an authentic Christian community. Ever since the beginning, this has been a hard task for the church, because it is a fight against our tribal instincts. Human beings have always had a tendency to cluster into groups of people who are “like us.” In whatever ways are important to us, whatever values are foremost in our minds, these are the markers we look for in creating community. And this is precisely what the church of Jesus Christ is working to overcome. The very radical thing that the […]
Continue readingOccupy
Scripture References: 2 Samuel 5:1-5,9-10; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10 The beauty of following a story through a series of Sundays is being able to see how characters develop. You think back to just a few weeks ago when we were reading about the boy who ran around with a slingshot in his back pocket, following the sheep around the pasture, running errands for his dad and his big brothers. You think about this little boy who bragged to the soldiers of Israel, I could beat that old giant any day! And they laughed him off. And then he did. That cute little boy from the hick little town of Bethlehem, ruddy and innocent – look at him now. He’s king over all Israel, ruling from his new stronghold, the city on a hill, the city of David. All the tribes of Israel came out to see him, they praised him and […]
Continue readingWeapons of Righteousness
2 Corinthians 6:1-13 1 Samuel 17:32-49 There is a film called, “In the Valley of Elah.” Tommy Lee Jones is a retired army sergeant, Hank, who is looking for his son, Mike. Mike has recently returned home from his tour in Iraq, and then disappeared. The film is about Hank’s search for Mike and the things he finds along the way. I had to watch it a couple of times before I understood the title. I know it was in the valley of Elah that the army of Israel faced off against a monster, their worst nightmare. In the valley of Elah, the people of God faced Goliath and found they had nothing, no one to match, and they were paralyzed by fear. At the valley of Elah, Israel looked at their weapons, their armor, themselves, and saw that they came up short in a particular, fatal way. Both armies […]
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