1 Samuel 3:1-10; John 1:43-51 “The word of the Lord was rare in those days.” This is the setting in which the young boy Samuel first heard the call of God to him. It was the period of time before there were kings in Israel, a time when Israel was ruled by judges, and if you have read the book of Judges then you know it was not a high point in Israel’s history. As the closing words in that book says, “all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” The word of the Lord was rare in those days. It was not one of the good times. The boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord in the temple under the authority of Eli, and Samuel was there for a reason. Before he was conceived, his mother Hannah was childless. She was married to Elkanah, who loved […]
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Who We Are
Mark 1:4-11 I always love this Sunday. The baptism of the Lord. It always comes the Sunday following Epiphany. It’s the one day of the year that we intentionally remember that Jesus was baptized by John, and that we are also called to be baptized into his family. For me, it’s always a treasured opportunity to talk with you about why we baptize, what it means to us. It’s easy to forget about baptism, really. Every new Christian is meant to be baptized, but we do it so infrequently that we seldom think of it. We all get baptized, but only once. And if you were baptized as an infant, as most of us were, you don’t even have any memory of it. Some people don’t even know for sure if they were baptized. Which is interesting to me. It says to me that baptism is sometimes a rather meaningless […]
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Matthew 2:1-12 Much of the time the stories from scripture live in our imaginations somewhat differently than they live on the pages of the Bible. This morning we sing an old familiar song, “We three kings of orient are, bearing gifts we travers afar.” And yet the scripture says nothing about them being kings. And, whatever we call them – kings, magi, wise men – the scripture never mentions how many of them there were. We only infer that from the number of gifts that were mentioned. Nonetheless, every nativity scene has three men bearing gifts, often wearing crowns. Because they’re kings. Only, they’re not. We’re really not sure what they are – except we know they are foreign. These guys are out-of-towners, and I think that helps to explain why they act as dumb as they do. They go to the king – Herod – to ask him for […]
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