What Jesus Does With Just This Much (Sermon preached 6 August 2023)

Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself (Matt 14:13). 

On our way to the Feeding of the Five Thousand, a miracle which, by the way, is attested in all four Gospels – everybody knows about it, not just church people –  we might want to pay particular attention to that opening line in Matthew’s account. Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. Obviously, Jesus has heard something. And seeing as how he needs to get away from everyone and everything, it sounds like that something might not be good.

 

Last week he was teaching up a storm. Rolling out parables, one after another, about the kingdom of heaven being like a mustard seed, or yeast, or a treasure hidden in a field, or a matchless pearl. But since then, something has happened. And no, it’s not good. In fact, it is really bad. In the 13-verse gap between last week’s parables and this morning’s story, Jesus has learned of the grisly execution of his cousin, John.

 

Herod Antipas, the Roman puppet governor of Galilee, at his own birthday party, became so enthralled by his stepdaughter’s dancing that he promised, in front of all of his guests, that he would give her whatever she wanted. And, coached by her mother, she asked for...(read more)

 

Treasured in the Gap (Sermon preached 23 July 2023)

“Beware the gaps in the lectionary!”A Biblical studies professor of mine once said that.

Beware those places in the Sunday readings where verses get skipped over. 

Okay, so if you are following along in the generic printed bulletins, you can’t tell that’s what happened a couple of minutes ago when Bruce read the Gospel. If you are reading from the online version, though, you can see the Scripture reference for this morning’s text is Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43.  Verses 31-35, right there in the middle of the passage, are left out.

And who, you may ask, decided to do this? The North American Consultation on Common Texts, in collaboration with the International English Language Liturgical Consultation, decided to do this! And they know what they are doing, right? 

I mean, all that’s in those five verses, between the story and Jesus’ explanation of it are a couple of “the kingdom of heaven is like” sayings, and a note that he liked teaching in parables. They don’t seem to have anything to do with this parable about a carefully planted field that gets contaminated under cover of darkness, and the meaning that his disciples, and you and I, are to draw from it. 

Still, I’m not sure they’ve done us any favors by taking that short cut to the tidy wrapping up of a story that on the surface seems pretty simple but, if we sit with it a bit longer, pretty challenging...(read more)

 

How We See (Sermon preached 2 July 2023)

I have a story to tell you. A fable, if you will, about a monastery that had fallen upon hard times. 

Once it had been a great order. However, as a result of waves of anti-monastic persecution during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the rise of secularism in the nineteenth and twentieth, all of its branch houses were lost, and its ranks became so decimated that only five monks remained in the now decaying mother house: the abbot and four others. All of them were in their 80s, and clearly it was only a matter of time before the order would die out.

In the deep woods that surrounded the monastery there was a little hut that a rabbi from a nearby town would occasionally use for a hermitage. Through their many years of prayer and contemplation the elderly monks had become a bit psychic, so they could somehow always sense when the rabbi was in his hermitage. “The rabbi is in the woods, the rabbi is in the woods again,” they would whisper to one another. 

At one such time, as the abbot agonized over the imminent death of his order, it occurred to him to go visit the hermitage. And ask the rabbi if by some possible chance he could offer any advice that might save the monastery...(read more) 

 

Faith in Transitions (Sermon preached 11 June 2023)

About that story we all just heard in the reading from Genesis, where God tells Abram to leave country and kindred and go to a land that God is going to show him? Well, I have a question.

I know, I know, it’s a REALLY important story. It is the opening scene in the epic saga out of which the three great Abrahamic faiths will emerge. For Jews, Abram is the one with whom God initiates a unique relationship with Israel. For Muslims, Abram is the one who originates the chain of prophets that culminates in Mohammed. And for us Christians, Abram is the icon of faith who shows us what trusting God looks like.

 

Given all that, I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that it’s taken me this long to wonder about the other key person in this story. The one who is mentioned only in passing, but who God, in effect, also summons to leave country and kindred and go. I’m talking about Abram’s wife, I’m talking about Sarai. And my question is, what about her call? What about her faith? (read more)

An Even Greater Superpower (Sermon preached 14 May 2023)

Last week, the New York Times ran an opinion piece by David French, a political commentator who this past January became one of their regular columnists. Undoubtedly some of you saw it – the title was Politics Cannot Fix What Ails Us. And tagline was “Solutions to social problems lie close to home”.

In his article, French notes that there are multiple significant negative cultural changes underway in our country including falling fertility rates; rising teen depression and anxiety, an epidemic of isolation and erosion of people’s sense of belonging; and an overall loss of social cohesion. These negative changes are profound, and don’t seem to have clear political solutions. 

And he observes an emerging pattern. We rightly feel a sense of loss, wrongly turn to politics to fill the hole in our lives, and then grow increasingly frustrated when the political process invariably fails to live up to the expectations that we place upon it. French is convinced that the true answer to our cultural challenge is much more parochial and personal... (read more)

 

Finding Illumination (Sermon preached 23 April 2023)

It was on the last full day of our pilgrimage trip to Holy Land that we finally got to Emmaus. To Emmaus Nicopolis, that is – the Byzantine town that scholars have traditionally identified as the Emmaus of Jesus’ time. There are actually a few other possibilities, including one that surfaced in 2019, Kiryat Yearim, an ancient fortified hill town a bit closer to Jerusalem.

By then our group of 25 had been together for ten days, and had developed a happy, comfortable rhythm. We knew the way on foot from our home base at St. George’s Guest House into the Old City, and had visited some sites there. We’d been off and back on the bus in Bethlehem and the Kidron Valley, and seen the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Shrine of the Book. We’d spent three nights in Nazareth; hit a couple of spots on the sea of Galilee; taken the sky tram up the face of the Mount of Temptation; and checked out the cave where Jesus is said to have fasted and prayed for 40 days and 40 nights. 

And looking back, now, from the vantage point of this morning, it seems to me that everything we’d seen and experienced was being gathered up on that final day, when we arrived where this story we just heard takes place...(read more)

 

A Family Story of Healing (Sermon preached 19 March 2023)

How do we sort through that tangle of a story? It was hard enough to stay with it, right? Forty-one verses! Such a long story, and it’s complicated. 

It’s about an unsought healing. It’s about the blame game. It’s about the process and progress of conversion. It’s about how wrong-headed following the rules can be. It’s about how easy it is to confuse blindness and seeing.

I imagine John had all these things in mind, and more, as he crafted this account of an unnamed man’s move from one way of being in the world to another. And his hearers,  beginning with that first century community in which he lived and wrote, and stretching on down through the centuries to you and me – have been recognizing ourselves in this story, ever since.

Who among us has not, when we don’t know what else to do, thought that if we could just figure out whose fault a tragedy is, somehow that would make it better? (read more)