I’m sure you all remember the past when people used to attend sporting events in person. And in the end zones at football games you’d often see someone holding up a sign that said John 3:16. And of course that’s scriptural shorthand for one of the sentences in today’s gospel, the one that tells us that God so loved the world that he sent his only son to bring us eternal life. I imagine that the people in the end zones with those signs think that if you were going to see only one sentence from the gospel, only remember one thing, that this is the one. Are they right?…
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As I was preparing to stand up here and preach on the Second Sunday of Lent I was struck by the fact that all the things the church usually says about what to do during Lent seem all wrong this year. I mean, I feel like Lent has already been going on for a year — didn’t Lent start last March and just never stop? We didn’t have Easter last year, we didn’t really have summer, I don’t think there was Christmas really. The mood for all of us has been subdued at best, and for many people it has been worse than that, a time of real loss and…
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If you ever read any of the gospels all the way through, every time you do it, something new will strike you that you have never noticed before. And I’ll bet that one thing you would notice sooner rather than later is how much of Jesus’s life was spent healing people. We tend to imagine a great deal of his life was spent talking, because so much care was taken to record some of the things he repeatedly said. But really, when he went from place to place, he must have spent more time healing people than preaching, and it’s that, more than his words, that drew enormous crowds to…
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We just heard two stories today, in that first reading and in the gospel, about God speaking to people very directly. So I think the question for today is, does God speak to people, and does he ever speak to us? The first problem we face trying to answer that question is this. We all have seen people who seem very sure God speaks to them all the time, and is it possible they’re delusional or confused? Unfortunately the answer is yes, it is quite possible. We’re human and we can all deceive ourselves or be deceived by others. Plenty of people manage to convince themselves they’re on God’s side…
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So if Advent is our season of waiting and expectation, what are we really waiting for in these last few days before Christmas? I think in today’s gospel we find out: We are waiting for someone to speak to us, with words about what is next — and not just generally, but next for us. We sometimes think those words are impossible. The great theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said Advent waiting is like miners who are trapped in a coal mine, waiting for any noise off in the distance as a sign that someone, anyone, is coming to rescue them. Maybe especially we feel that way this year, we have all…
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Jesus told the disciples a lot of things that they had trouble understanding, even some things they probably had a problem believing. One of those things was this, he said that after he was dead and gone from them, leaving them behind, that they would actually be better off and more fortunate then, and the reason he gave was that then, they would have the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, he said, would give them everything they needed and more, not just to live, but to live in joy, to live as his followers, to be able to do the great things he told them needed to be done. So why…
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I’ve been leading this Good Friday service here for more than 20 years, but I’ve never seen the sight I’m looking at now, which is 600 empty places. It seems all wrong, but in a way, maybe it’s not. This liturgy is partly about a deep feeling of emptiness that comes upon all of us. At the end of this gospel we just heard, everyone has scattered, the entire cast of characters of the gospels has disappeared, there’s a tomb with a stone in front of it, this great city where something amazing was supposed to happen seems suddenly deserted, and night has come. On Good Friday this is where…
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When we hear this story, it’s hard not to think we are hearing the world saying no as loudly as it could to everything Jesus lived for. It was a no to all his teaching in the countryside, gathering the poor to be encouraged and healed, going from place to place doing no apparent harm, there was something about it that led to today, it all had to be stopped, both religious and civil leaders saw it as easier to just put him to death. And he was subjected to the worst kind of death they could think of, not just execution but degradation, a way of saying that he…
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At times in the gospel, we have to be grateful to Jesus, because he had a marvelous instinct for simplifying things. In his time, we are told that there were more than 600 laws that devout Jews were supposed to know and follow, dietary rules, rules about behavior, more than half were things that you were simply never to do. So it might seem like it was something of a relief for Jesus to say that really, not to throw out the other 600 laws, but if you could get two of them right, love God and love your neighbor as yourself, and to be told that if you do…
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What God has joined together no human being may separate. I say these words at every wedding I do. They were probably said at your wedding. Like many words we hear all the time, we tend to take them for granted. Today, we get the context of where they come from, though, and it’s possible that hearing the context they will make us a little uncomfortable. Because today we are back in touch with a Jesus we don’t know how to deal with — the uncompromising Jesus. He is asked a question about whether divorce is possible, since under the law of Moses it was very possible, especially for a…