April 18, 2016

The wedding at Cana is one of the great stories in the Bible and the first time that Jesus performs a miracle in the Gospel of John. But what it doesn’t tell you, like so many stories crafted from the memory of the Gospel writers is all the details. We also read in the closing passage of the Gospel of John, ‘that Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.’ It’s one of the only places in the Gospels where the writer speaks in the first person…”I”.

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April 18, 2016

I think we can all agree that the Christmas hangovers of gift-giving, binge-eating, and the New Year’s promise of resolution-making are already winding down. Maybe some of you, like me, have already started to slip in terms of resolving to work out more. It was simply too cold this week to do anything more than walk the dog. That’s what I told myself and I’m sticking to it, and well, I’ll do better this next week. Which will, surely, be warmer, because I have resolved to work out more this year.

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April 18, 2016

The text today describes the story of Mary having to deal with a markedly rebellious adolescent. Now, the fact that this teenager who disappears for a few DAYS is God gives us a little pause, because we know the ending and the outcome that all will be well, that Christ will teach and have disciples, and this is only chapter 2 of Luke, but I’ll tell you…if I had run off at age 12, without telling anyone where I was going for a couple of days, lost in the big city, without informing the authorities, and my folks were the first to find me? Suffice to say that not only would I have had trouble sitting down for a day or two but I would have been on some significant restrictions for much, much longer. We’re not talkin’ days or weeks. Maybe months.

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January 7, 2016

We get soooooo excited at this time of year to just rush to celebrate Christmas. I think that’s probably because we truly ARE in a rush to celebrate Christmas. It’s only 11 days until many of us have to manage Christmas Eve, the excitement of the kids’ first day off from school, coming here to church…(you are coming to church that day, right ?), and somehow getting the special dinner ready and if you are German like me then you open gifts on Christmas Eve the 24th and so…

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January 7, 2016

Once again, we hear the clarion call of preparing the way for the Lord. This appears in our Bible about 4 times annually, every year, and I think we might have become deaf to its message because we hear it so often. Yeah, yeah, whatever, Christ is coming, and then we know the story after that. We miss the wonder of this text because we know the ending, and the 2,000 years of history since its writing. We just don’t do a good job of really reflecting on whether we have prepared our lives to live in God’s sight this day and each day. But if you and I were part of the story when the people did NOT in fact know that the Messiah was coming, they still did NOT do a good job of repenting their lives and following God and preparing their lives to live in God’s sight this day and each day. That’s why we’re getting reminded of the Malachi text here of the importance of the guy who we would otherwise ignore, John the Baptist, who wears animal skins, looks like he has not shaved or showered in years (because he maybe hasn’t) and eats a starvation diet of locusts and honey.

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January 7, 2016

Thanksgiving’s over, THANK GOODNESS. Many of you went to other peoples’ houses, or maybe had some folks over to your own, and we got together full of expectations of good food, good times, and being joyful as we gathered for something that happens only once a year…4 days off from work or school without having to use any vacation time. So you can imagine in our text today all the people are gathered for something that happens once a year—the Passover. Passover is a time when they went over to other peoples’ houses, or maybe had some folks over to their own, full of expectations of good food, good times, and being joyful as they gathered. Maybe they even had a few days off from work or school. Life’s rhythms are sometimes the same no matter what place or country we are in, no matter if it was 2,000 years ago or it’s 2,000 years from now.

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