John 18:33-37 Although it might seem like forever-ago, it’s been just a few weeks since we had a very contentious midterm election in this country. It dominated the news for weeks beforehand, and even after. Many Americans needed to take anti-anxiety meds or practice their yoga breathing just to get through it – especially on election night while we watched the odds-makers continually revising their predictions about who would win. Mid-term elections have become more like presidential year elections, in that they have taken on a national tone. People don’t just care about their local and state representatives – they care deeply about everyone else’s representatives. People make donations to high profile candidates in states far away from their own, all because governing this country has become, for a great many of us, a cosmic showdown between the forces of good and evil. Our guys are good, while the opponents […]
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Love and Happiness
Mark 1:4-11 There are a few passages from scripture that are so well known and loved that they almost become etched on our hearts. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” is one of them. “For God so loved the world he gave his only begotten Son,” is another. These are special; no one should mess with these. “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” is also one of these, I think. But when I read this story of the baptism of Jesus in the Common English Bible translation, it had me in a whole new way. “You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness.” What beautiful language. Maybe not poetic in the way that the King James Bible is poetic, but clear and direct and beautiful in its message to us. You are my Son, whom I dearly love. In you I […]
Continue readingGo and See
Mark 6:30-44 Recently, I came across this list of the top ten things you never hear in church. Hey – it’s my turn to sit in the front row! Pastor, I was so enthralled, I never noticed your sermon ran 25 minutes over. Personally, I find witnessing much more enjoyable than golf. How long is the waiting list to serve on session? I’ll be the permanent nursery volunteer. Isn’t it great to have the children running around the church making a joyful noise? I LOVE it when we sing songs I’ve never heard before! No, don’t ask someone else. Let me do it. Pastor, we’d like to send you to this Bible seminar in Hawaii. Nothing inspires me and strengthens my commitment like our annual stewardship drive![1] We always hear a few groans when stewardship time comes around. It seems, to many folks, like a necessary evil. We wish we […]
Continue readingLiving Through Our Tears
Isaiah 25:6-9 John 11:32-44 Not long ago in our Tuesday Bible Study we discussed a text from the book of Ezra in which the people of Israel are gathering at the site of the new temple. The young ones cheer for joy and the old ones cry. And the cheers were loud and the weeping was loud, and you couldn’t make out the crying from the shouting because it was all mixed up together. Sort of like a school playground during kindergarten recess. And we mused about why the old ones were crying. Possibly because they felt a fresh wave of grief over the loss of the old temple, and all the loss that had gone with it. But it’s also possible their tears were expressions of joy and gratitude, because they were given a chance to begin again. Tears can have many meanings. Quite likely, these tears were a mixture […]
Continue readingThe Benefits of Membership
Mark 10:35-45 I was thinking of my old friend Bill this past week. He died a couple of years ago at the age of 82. I first met him when he invited me to join him and his wife to a dinner theatre performance of The Sound of Music. He picked me up in his Buick. We talked about cars. Bill was an avid member of the Buick Club of America. I never knew there was a Buick Club until I met Bill. He was very enthusiastic about it. He went to Buick meets, joined in with Buick Club tours whenever he could. Bill had a barn on his property which held a variety of Buicks, so part of the fun was deciding which one to drive when he went to Buick Club events. The Buick Club was not his whole life, though. He was also a Free Mason, and […]
Continue readingReceiving the Kingdom
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 […]
Continue readingStumbling 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 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 […]
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