Luke 12:49-56 Some years ago, I was at a meeting for a national church committee on which I was serving, and during a break in our work I asked one of the other pastors what he was preaching on the next Sunday. That’s how pastors make small talk. He told me he was preaching on Luke 12:49-56, and he was none too happy about it. He told me that he had been avoiding this passage for 30 years. Whenever it came around in the lectionary, he would look for something else to preach on, because this one made him too uncomfortable. But he had reached the point where his avoidance of it was making him even more uncomfortable, so he was going in. He would gird his loins and dive in. It’s a good thing he finally did that, because this is one the church needs to hear, frequently. […]
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Promise Born of Pain
Genesis 21:8-21 Matthew 10:24-39 I am often surprised by how clearly the scriptures speak to our contemporary troubles. The texts we read each Sunday are thousands of years old, and yet sometimes the relevance of the words leap off the page. I think the author of the book of Ecclesiastes captures it for all time when he says there is nothing new under the sun, and there is a season for everything. Our hopes are the hopes of people always and everywhere. and the troubles we face are the same kinds of troubles people have always faced. The trouble in the text from Matthew’s gospel is this: Jesus knows that his followers will have plenty of conflict ahead. They will be persecuted and oppressed and misunderstood. The disciple is not above the teacher, he says. Could he be any clearer? Why should the disciples expect to have an easy stroll through […]
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