Jesus’s ascension is a very hard scene for us to picture. It’s a moment of spectacular special effects, maybe, or a religious vision that most of us have never experienced anything like. But however it happened and however you picture it, this ascension is something Jesus told the disciples would happen, that after his resurrection his physical presence would only be with them for a while, and then their world would be turned upside down yet again. It must have been hard for them. On that first Easter they all found it hard to believe the story of the women, they all found it hard to accept that he was…
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We often hear it said that human beings were created in God’s image. And most days, we have no idea how that could possibly be true. Because after all God must be perfect, while here on earth, the rest of us behave in ways that don’t seem very perfect, and there are places where evil and death have their way, sometimes on a horrifying scale. How could we possibly be made in God’s image, when all of us seem so far from being anything like God? But on Good Friday, our task here today is to see God’s image differently and to see our own image differently too. Because it…
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This is much more than the usual healing story from the gospels. We know that Jesus healed people who came to him, or sometimes even people who didn’t seem to be seeking him out. But this is a long story that seems to have a much bigger message for us, about what following Jesus really involves. It’s actually a story about what it means to be a holy and grace-filled human being and how you get there. Let’s start by noticing all the talk about sin and uncleanness in this gospel. As a blind person of course this man who was healed was an outcast, but it seems like he…
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I don’t know if you’re the kind of person who wants everything at Christmas to be perfect. You know what I mean: everything perfectly decorated, the perfect gift chosen for everyone, and above all that everyone close to you is where they should be. If you are like that, my guess is that for the second year in a row, you haven’t gotten your Christmas wish. I know I haven’t. We’re here tonight well aware that as humans we’re just not as in charge as we would like to be. For all of us it’s a source of frustration, for other it’s a source of real loss. The world turns…
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The Pentecost reading we heard first today describes something that sounds hard to believe in, It is the Holy Spirit finally arriving as Jesus said it would and what it really is, is a picture of real liberation. First it seems to bring an enormous release of energy. These disciples have been locked in a room, puzzled about what is next, maybe just a little the way we’ve been locked up for more than a year, but all of a sudden they feel a tremendous readiness to get out of there. And when they do, there are suddenly no barriers of communication between them and total strangers, they find words…
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Almost every Lent, we hear this story of the man born blind. And it’s one of the essential stories for Lent because it’s about transformation — someone experiencing dramatic change and even liberation. And during Lent, that is what we are all after, a sense that something new is possible for us, something that frees us from whatever we need to leave behind. But what we also see in this story is that transformation isn’t easy. We can’t rise to something new without giving up the old. Even this story of the blind man, who is healed by Jesus without even asking for it, shows that change has unintended consequences.…
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Sometimes people say that we don’t know very much about what kind of a life awaits us after this life here on earth is over. And of course on the one hand that’s true, because no one here has ever seen it. But we do actually know something about what it’s going to feel like. There’s one consistent image that God has given us over and over in the scriptures, and it’s the image of a wedding feast. It’s a real disadvantage to be up here preaching about wedding feasts at a time like this, because right now it’s hard to remember what’s it’s like to be at a celebration…
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There are a few things in the gospel that Jesus was extraordinarily clear about, and one of them was that it is very, very dangerous any time we think we are in a position to judge the sins or the faith of other people. You can think immediately of Jesus telling the people who were ready to stone the woman taken in adultery that only if they were without sin themselves should they be throwing a stone. You can also remember he pointed out how eager we are to point out the speck in someone else’s eye when we can’t see the log in our own. He was pretty clear…
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I grew up in a big extended family that had only recently arrived in the United States, and like a lot of people with that kind of a history, my world growing up was divided into two parts. There were the people who were in my extended family and the people who weren’t. The people who were in the family were the people you were told you could trust, they were the people you helped before anyone else who might need helping, they were the people you spent all your time with, whether you wanted to or not. And as I got older, some of them definitely fell into the…
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King Solomon in our first reading told God that he wanted to be wise, and apparently God granted this wish. If you continue reading the story of Solomon, you’ll read the part where Solomon judges between two women arguing over possession of a baby. Solomon proposes to split the baby in two as a way of settling the argument, and the reaction of the two women reveals who the real mother is. It’s supposed to show how wise he was. But the fact is, Solomon was not always wise. He was a king, and the powerful especially lose sight of wisdom all the time. It turned out his kingdom started…