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 […]
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Stumbling 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, […]
Continue readingPerfect Submission
James 3:13-4:3, 7-8 Mark 9:30-37 Sometimes, when I read certain gospel passages, I think about a young Chinese woman I knew several years ago. She was a student where I was serving as campus minister. She started coming to me because she was interested in Christianity. So we began getting together to read the gospels. One day as we were working our way through a passage, she stopped reading and looked at me with this perplexed expression on her face and asked, “Why did he say that?” I felt kind of stupid then, because I didn’t know. In fact, I was surprised at her surprise, because I had never thought about why he said what he said. I am embarrassed to say that I didn’t have anything like a good answer for her. But she got me thinking about how profoundly strange the gospel is. It is strange – and […]
Continue readingHow to Follow Jesus
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 readingLearning 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 […]
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