Psalm 25 (for March 5, 2006)

Psalm 25

A David psalm

1My head is high, GOD, held high; 2I’m looking to you, GOD;

No hangdog skulking for me.

3I’ve thrown in my lot with you;

You won’t embarrass me, will you?

Or let my enemies get the best of me?

Upcoming: Psalm for 2.26.06

Psalm 50:1-6

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Psalm 50

1The God of gods–it’s GOD!-speaks out, shouts, “Earth!” welcomes the sun in the east,farewells the disappearing sun in the west.

Complacently pleased with themselves (readings for Sunday, Oct 28)

Perhaps you’ve heard the old saw that says Jesus “comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable,” while we in the church tend to “comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted.” He’s at it again in this Sunday’s readings.

Pharisees—one of whom plays a role in Jesus’ story— are not the generic bad guys they’ve been made out to be. While some of them tangle with Jesus, others come to his aid. There’s no reason to doubt that many were sincere God-followers.

But Jesus has a quarrel with their world-view. Remember, Judea is militarily occupied by the Roman army. The Hebrew Scriptures often taught that such calamity was a result of God’s judgment. Pharisees assumed, then, that what was needed was more careful obedience to the religious code of their ancestors. Then God would be pleased, bless their nation, whip the Romans, and demonstrate his power over nations. Their plan was to get more and more people to live legally, and to distance themselves from those who didn’t, until they were powerful once more. Who could oppose such an idea?

Not even the enemy of HIS enemies!

Third Sunday of Easter • April 26, 2009

Acts 3:12-19; Psalm 4; 1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36b-48

I’ve been thinking a lot about why we come here.

We need a sense of that – a sense of what we’re here for. Just making a church bigger – that doesn’t do it for me. We’ve been down that road. It isn’t enough to satisfy my hunger.

Why do I come here?

I think I want one thing more than anything else: I want to bring love into my world. I want to bring it to my family. I want to bring it to you. I want to bring it to people on the street. I want to bring it to political decisions. I want to bring it to unloved people. I want to bring it to people on the internet. I want to bring it to the nations of the world.

I want love to change this world. I want it to smother tragedy. I want it to expose selfishness. I want it to change the way my family lives, my workplace operates, my government thinks.

What I want to do here is to re-capture that source of love – and share it in such a way that you do, too – so that love will make everything you touch as you walk through your week just a little different than it was before.

But my world doesn’t get that. It thinks love is a wimpy thing, not the way of heroes. So all week long I talk and visit and write to people who are convinced the Kingdom of God is not enough, and it cannot bring what the world needs. And sometimes their arguments wear me down.

And that’s why I come here. It’s because we’re doing something together. We’re believers that the love of God is stronger than anything that’s wrong in the world. We’re determined to bring it to the places we live and work and vote and write. You’re doing something.

The End of Exclusion (Sermon of 8 Feb 09)

Image by Victor V via Flickr

With the casting out of the demon on that first Sabbath afternoon of Jesus’ public ministry, his obscurity vanished. Like a cannon shot, news of it exploded through the villages. Here’s what happens next.

Mark 1:29-39 (MSG)

29-31Directly on leaving the meeting place, they came to Simon and Andrew’s house, accompanied by James and John. Simon’s mother-in-law was sick in bed, burning up with fever. They told Jesus. He went to her, took her hand, and raised her up. No sooner had the fever left than she was up fixing dinner for them.

32-34That evening, after the sun was down, they brought sick and evil-afflicted people to him, the whole city lined up at his door! He cured their sick bodies and tormented spirits. Because the demons knew his true identity, he didn’t let them say a word.

35-37While it was still night, way before dawn, he got up and went out to a secluded spot and prayed. Simon and those with him went looking for him. They found him and said, “Everybody’s looking for you.”

38-39Jesus said, “Let’s go to the rest of the villages so I can preach there also. This is why I’ve come.” He went to their meeting places all through Galilee, preaching and throwing out the demons.

The Message (MSG) Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson

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About Peter’s mother-in-law:   Actually, she deacons to them.  For reasons of their own (that look a great deal like gender bias!), translators treat the word to mean “became a deacon in a church” when it applies to men, but “waiting tables” when it applies to women (See Richard Swanson: Provoking the Gospel of Mark; A Storyteller’s Commentary, p 108). “In the context of Jewish understandings of the abundance that God created when making the world, the deacon was in charge of enacting God’s created intentions.”  Peter’s mother-in-law was in charge of enacting God’s created intentions.

Likely she was well known for helping others.  Is this why the crowd knew where to show up at sundown? Some think the women who followed Jesus were the reason women dared approach him. Think of the women at the cross who ministered to Jesus all the way through – perhaps greater heroes than we know, and greater shapers of the story than we know.

She’s up, she’s deaconing, and at sundown, a throng gathers at the door. Who can tell me why they came at sundown? Because that’s when the day after the Jewish sabbath began. Jesus had no problem healing on the Sabbath, but the crowds apparently assumed he would.