Matthew 3:13-17 I was in my office one morning at the church I served as pastor when a couple of members walked in to see me. They had a dilemma they wanted me to resolve. Their granddaughter was getting married. She and her fiancé had a one-year-old son. The family wanted the child to be baptized. They also wanted her fiancé to be baptized. The baby was easy, it would be done like any other ordinary baptism, in church during worship. The fiancé, however, was more of a problem. He was willing, basically because it was important to the family he was marrying into. But he was a big, tough guy, and felt it would be embarrassing to stand in front of the congregation and submit to having me splash him with water. So the family thought they could solve the problem by holding a private baptism for him. Just […]
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Why Are They Here?
Matthew 2:1-12 I don’t know if you ever think about why the books of the Bible are ordered the way they are. But I can tell you one reason Matthew is first in the New Testament. Matthew is first because– of all the gospels – it most clearly and directly links the story of Jesus with the prophets of the Old Testament. Matthew is constantly saying things like, “as it was written by the prophets,” and “this was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet.” Matthew connects all the dots. He tells us what we need to know. Yet, as pedantic as Matthew is sometimes, he is also full of surprises at other times. Take the genealogy in Chapter 1. To which you might say, “No thanks, I’m good. You can keep it.” Nobody reads the genealogies in the Bible. They’re boring. Nobody cares about all those names. […]
Continue readingHow Will We Meet Him?
Matthew 2:13-23 Let me tell you a story. It’s from a book called A Single Light, by Maia Wojciechowska. The story takes place in Spain, but it could be anywhere. There was a small village that had once been important but no longer was; it had once been prosperous but no longer was. A young man in this village went off to the city to find his fortune. He didn’t find a fortune, but he did find a wife – Maria, whom he loved very much – and he brought her home to the village. Soon she was pregnant, a joyful thing, and gave birth to a child – a girl. Maria loved her child and thought her perfect. She would say, “Look how she never cries! Only angels never cry. My child must be an angel.” Within a few months everyone in the village knew what Maria couldn’t see – that the child was deaf and mute. She would […]
Continue readingIncarnation (A Christmas Eve message)
John 1:1-14 If you are familiar with the C.S. Lewis story, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, you know it is a winter story – a magical story. It is the kind of story we can hear better at Christmas time. We are, somehow, more ready to open our hearts and minds to the miraculous at this time of year. The story is about four children who go through a magical wardrobe into another world, the land of Narnia, a place where it is always winter but never Christmas. This is the first story C.S. Lewis wrote in his series about Narnia, but it is not actually the beginning of the story – the whole story. There is another book Lewis wrote sometime later that gives the back story to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It’s called The Magician’s Nephew. The lion called Aslan first appears in The Magician’s Nephew. He […]
Continue readingAppearances
Isaiah 7:10-16 ; Matthew 1:18-25 It is good that we have a Sunday in Advent devoted to remembering Joseph. Joseph, the man who is the father – yet is not the father – of Jesus; Joseph, who doesn’t even get a mention in two of the four gospels; Joseph – the man who raised the Son of God. How he must have struggled with emotion in those early days. When he learns that the young woman he has chosen for his wife is somehow pregnant. And he knows it wasn’t him. How he must have fought down all kinds of feelings while he struggled to determine how he would respond to this news. He knew, of course, that the law would support him if he chose to have her publicly exposed and condemned as an adulterous woman. Because even though they were not yet married, they were betrothed to one another, something that was as […]
Continue readingStill Waiting
Isaiah35:1-10 Matthew11:2-11 Food trucks have been around for a very long time, but in recent years they have really gone upscale, with dishes rivaling fine restaurants. In some cities there are areas set up where food trucks congregate, around some picnic tables, making an outdoor food court on a gravel patch. People flock to them. They were popular in Dayton, Ohio when we lived there. We encountered some food truck connoisseurs loved to talk about their favorites, and one of these at the time was a certain hot dog truck. Zombie Dogs. At food festivals you might see hundreds of people lined up for this one. People would wait two hours in line for a Zombie Dog. And then they would rave about how good they were. They were “amazing” or “to die for.” Best hot dogs ever. However, it is my opinion that if someone has waited in line two hours […]
Continue readingDoing A New Thing
Matthew 3:1-12 Some years ago I was in my office at the university where I served as campus minister – and a student named Brad came in. He told me he was working with a congregation in a nearby town, called ebc – that’s all lowercase letters. Previously, they had been known as Emmanuel Bible Chapel, but the new name, ebc, was a part of their rebranding effort. He told me ebc is much more “user friendly” than their old name. Brad explained to me that he was a marketing major and was working with the church to help them grow and achieve their goal to become a multi-campus church. This is how it would work. The church establishes satellite congregations they call campuses where they have a local worship team, which is primarily responsible for music and also prayer. The head pastor is at the flagship campus where he preaches every Sunday to an in-house congregation. But his sermons are also […]
Continue readingIn the Waiting
Matthew 24:36-44 Jesus is coming. Are you ready? And as I ask this question, you might be thinking of all your lists. Shopping lists, baking lists, card lists. You might be thinking of your calendar dates– concert dates, dinner dates, party dates, arranging flights or picking up folks at the airport dates. You might be squirming in your pew as you realize just how not-ready you are. I sometimes feel like I need to apologize to the church for Advent. While our heads are full of Christmas, the church is saying, let’s talk about something else, because it’s not Christmas yet. This is jarring. Because everywhere else you look, Christmas is in full swing. On TV, on the radio, in the stores, everywhere you go. The culture is at least a month ahead of us on the calendar. It all comes so early and lasts so long, we feel […]
Continue readingA Future with Hope
Jeremiah 29:10-14 Years ago I traveled from Iowa to San Francisco to attend a work-related conference. It felt like a different world. Walking through the city, I encountered the homeless on every street, begging. My colleagues and I talked about what was the right thing to do – whether to give, how to give. We wanted to help, we wanted to do the right thing, but it’s often unclear what the right thing is. One of my colleagues decided that she was going to give something to every person who asked and she did– until she ran out of money to give. When one more man approached her asking for something, she stopped, looked him in the eye and said, “I am all out, I have given it all away, and there is still so much need. How much am I supposed to give?” He shrugged and turned away. It was […]
Continue readingA Cheerful Giver
2 Corinthians 9:6-15 ; Luke21:1-4 I remember an autumn Sunday from many years ago when I sat in the pews of my church, and the pastor stepped into the pulpit. It was the custom at that time for the pastor to make the announcements of the church right before the sermon. He began with an announcement about the budget. At that time in my life I paid zero attention to budget matters, but apparently there were some financial difficulties, budget shortfall, if you can imagine such a thing. I only half listened, but at some point I noticed that his announcement was running really long. About 20 minutes later he stopped talking. He acknowledged rather sheepishly that he had spent too much time on the announcements and would forgo his sermon rather than make us suffer through another 20 minutes of him talking. The congregation laughed, he wrapped up with a prayer, and that was that. But […]
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