Not As the World Gives

Jesus’ Farewell and the Gift of Peace

April 29, 2013 By 1 Comment

by MaryAnn McKibben Dana

Gospel Reading:  John 14:23-29

For Sunday, May 5, 2013—Easter 6

I’m reading the seventh Harry Potter book to my daughters these days.

While I love J.K. Rowling’s expansive imagination and loving attention to detail, the book could’ve been 200 pages shorter. But given how much bookshelf real estate the latter books take up, it’s clear that Rowling got so big as an author that no editor could tame her. No editor was willing to stand up to her and say, “No, Jo—you don’t need to show us Xenophilius Lovegood’s castle-shaped house in quite such exquisite detail.”

I feel that way about Jesus in his Farewell Discourse.

“I am going away.” We know.

“I will be sending the Advocate.” I believe you said that five minutes ago.

“I am with you just a little longer.” Well, the marathon sermon makes it seem like an eternity. [Read more...]

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They All Come Tumbling Down

Waiting for the end or waiting for the end of the day?

November 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

by Jodi-Renee Giron

Gospel Reading: Mark 13:1-8

For Sunday, November 18, 2012, Year B − Ordinary 33

After a day spent talking about loving your neighbor and commending sacrificial widows, Jesus and the disciples walk away from the temple in Jerusalem. Seemingly buoyed-up from their theological one-up on the scribes, the disciples point out to their teacher the glorious architecture surrounding them.

Maybe it’s indicative that Jesus didn’t share their triumphant attitude because he tells the disciples that not one stone of this architectural grandeur will be left standing. [Read more...]

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The Three Stooges

June 12, 2011 By 4 Comments

Is the Trinity only good for benedictions?

by Michael Danner

Epistle Reading: 2 Corinthians 13:11 – 13

For Sunday, June 19, 2011; Year A—The Holy Trinity

I grew up watching The Three Stooges after school. It was an old black and white show about three friends who are rather dim. They get into all sorts of trouble. Then they respond to one another with various kinds of violence. They would smack each other in the head, poke each other in the eyes and knock each other down. It was quite funny and, for the pranksters among us, full of useful ideas.

I often wonder if the Holy Trinity ever engages in this kind of behavior?  Does the Spirit pull a chair, I mean throne, out from underneath Jesus? Does Jesus ever pull the Father’s anthropomorphic nose? Can the Father play elaborate practical jokes on the Spirit that proceeds from him? Or is that just tautologically absurd?

Borderline Blasphemous

This would border on the blasphemous if not for my suspicion that most people in the pews give about this much attention to the Holy Trinity. We’re good with Father, Son and Spirit when taken individually. God the Father dominates the Old Testament. Jesus makes a splash in the gospels. The Holy Spirit moves about in Acts and beyond. Yet, about the only time we see them together is in benedictions, like the kind we find in today’s epistle reading.

Paul’s best wishes for the church  in Corinth.

After saying some pretty difficult things to the Church in Corinth, the Apostle Paul ends with some final words and a

  [Read more...]

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Circuitous Story

April 4, 2011 By 8 Comments

Isn’t it wiser to accept the inevitable? 

by Mike Stavlund 

Gospel Reading:  John 11:1-45

For Sunday, Apr. 10, 2011:  Year A - Lent 5  

I’ve always been a Matthew Man. My beloved Gospel writer is practical and straightforward. Slightly metaphorical, with some Messianic overtones. More leisurely than Mark, and without all the clinical rigor from Dr. Luke. But John is just too much. Too “spiritual” (whatever that means, and whatever that helps). 

I imagine John’s Jesus with perfectly blow-dried and coiffed hair, moving about with his feet barely touching the ground and with stilted characters standing around him. It reads like a bad high school play, with the lead actor staring at the lights and all of the supporting actors delivering their lines as mini-monologues. In this week’s passage, even Jesus is enacting obfuscation with euphemisms, and then delivering stage-whispers to God: “I’m only saying this so they’ll hear me, Father.”

High-eyebrowed Expectation

Had I never read this before, I wonder if the conclusion would be as obvious as it is to me now. Everyone is leaning toward Jesus, offering pedantic dialogue about ephemeral matters, hoping for all their breath that John will write their words down on his scroll for posterity. Allusions, foreshadowing,  and high-eyebrowed expectation that Jesus is about to do the impossible.    

And it’s so circuitous − so long! The words stretch down the page, and yet the conclusion is quite abrupt. Lazarus finally comes out, and everyone gives everyone else a high-five. Everyone, that is, except the stunned Lazarus.  We don’t hear anything else from him. 

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This Branch Is Slower than Christmas

November 28, 2010 By 15 Comments

Why is the stump of Jesse taking so long to fill the whole world with the knowledge of God?

by Danielle Shroyer

Old Testament Reading: Isaiah 11:1-10

For Sunday, December 5, 2010 Year A - Advent 2

Picture it: Sicily, 1928. (Golden Girls fans, you’re welcome.) Actually, the picture happened last year, at my son’s kindergarten Christmas program. There they all were, five- and six-year-olds, fidgeting on risers and fumbling with their little Christmas collars, big smiles on their faces and unashamed voices booming forth, singing, “You be the lion strong and wild, I’ll be the lamb, meek and mild; we’ll live together happily, ‘cause that’s how it ought to be.”

This passage from Isaiah has always been one of my favorites. It illustrates many of the deepest hopes I hold, the ones where our world will be filled not with pain and destruction but with righteousness and justice, that day when a little child shall lead us up to that holy mountain because we are ready, finally, to turn in our damaging ways for the way of the Lord.

Can we raise the banners yet?

At Advent, we Jesus-types declare our bold hopes for the world to the world. Go tell it on the mountain, we say, over the hills and everywhere! “Let earth receive her King!”, we sing.

Indeed, the first two stanzas of our Isaiah text leave us no reason to hold back our enthusiasm. In Advent we proclaim that Isaiah’s words have been made manifest through the Christ child, the branch growing forth from the tree of Jesse. And those of us who follow this Christ child affirm that yes, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding and the fear of the Lord rested upon his shoulders. We affirm that he has judged the poor with righteousness. We know all too well how, through those convicting parables, the words of his mouth have assailed us in all our shadowed places. We say all of this with holiday cheer and merriment, even, because we believe it’s the best thing — he’s the best thing — that has happened to us.

But then we get to the third stanza, the part about the lions and the lambs and the child-friendly snakes. There is a chasm the size of Texas between those two stanzas. There is a black hole of despair just waiting for us, daring us to try to make the jump. It’s all death eaters and dementors down there, sucking the life right out.

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Waiting on the Felonies of Jesus

November 21, 2010 By 12 Comments

Can we keep preaching these texts, year after year, and expect people to believe he is coming?

by Russell Rathbun

Gospel Reading: Matthew 24:36-44

For Sunday, Nov. 28, 2010: Year C – Advent 1

Nothing raises my holiday spirits like the anticipated threat of Jesus kidnapping someone at work and then breaking into my house and robbing me. And the fun part is, it will all be a surprise! Yeah.

No Need to Fear

This is how we begin the season of Advent. The only thing more fun would be if it could be little baby Jesus doing the kidnapping and the breaking and entering. If it wasn’t a little funny, it would be really creepy. But there’s no need to fear the Almighty’s surprise felony threat. The church has been preaching this for a very long time, and Jesus hasn’t gotten so much as a speeding ticket.

Still Waiting on the Promised Peace

Advent is the perpetuation of a promise that remains unfulfilled. I know it seems like a threat and not a promise in week one’s Gospel text, but the central thrust of the liturgical season is the expectation of the fulfillment of God’s promise of the coming of Messiah—again.

It is the celebration of the fulfillment of God’s Older Testament promise of Messiah and the anticipation of the fulfillment of the New Testament’s promise that Jesus the Messiah will come again to complete the fullness of the Kingdom of God. But why does he need to come again? Why didn’t the lion lie down with the lamb the first time? [Read more...]

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Attack Drones into Solar Arrays?

November 21, 2010 By 5 Comments

Is it better to preach the promise of peace or to proclaim the reality of its long-standing absence?

by Russell Rathbun

Old Testament Reading: Isaiah 2:1-5

For Sunday, Nov. 28, 2010: Year C – Advent 1

In contrast to the Gospel reading for Advent 1, the Old Testament text is more universal and less threatening. It is a vision of the end of days that promises peace. Actually it more than makes promises — it reports peace as a fact.

Swords to Plowshares

It is a report about how the Lord will establish the Lord’s house in a new holy place that is neither theirs nor theirs − all will be invited. It’s not about me, my house, or how I better be ready for the sneak attack or else. The Lord will arbitrate any differences and all will respond by turning instruments of war to implements of cultivation. Swords to plowshares.

I don’t have a sword and I don’t have a plowshare. What would be a contemporary equivalent? They shall transform their MQ-9 Reaper Drones into 500 Mega Watt Solar Arrays. It lacks the poetry of swords and plowshares. It is the text’s poetic nature that makes it feel more universal and less immediate than the Gospel text.

[Read more...]

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Image of the Invisible?

November 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

What does it mean to be the image of the invisible God?

by Russell Rathbun

Epistle Reading: Colossians 1:11-20

For Sunday, Nov. 21, 2010: Year C – Christ the King Sunday

This is so much of what I want to hear: He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

Of the Now

I like this text’s unshrinking dismissal of any power or authority other than that which proceeds from the Living God. This dismissal is not just about the world to come, or some kind of non-material after life, but is embedded in the blood and earth and death and life of the now.

I long for the reassurance that God, whom I have long been convinced has redeemed my soul, also redeems a living breathing us, freeing us in the midst of our cultural and political context.

Spiritualizing or Intellectualizing

Somewhere along my journey from passionate evangelical to intellectual-social-gospel-liberal, I absorbed the phrase: don’t over-spiritualize the text. Which I guess would be the tendency to let oneself off the hook when it comes to verses like, laying down one’s life for a friend, or give away all that you have.

I was supposed to take those things seriously. They were not spiritual metaphors, but concrete actions. Feed the hungry, care for the widows. Those are real things. I should be doing them, but somehow on my journey, I went from spiritualizing such commands to intellectualizing them. Like, giving away all that I have, meant adopting an anti-consumerist, small carbon footprint ideology.

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Peace or Revolution?

September 13, 2010 By 4 Comments

How do you have a revolution when you are trying to appease the throne?

by Russell Rathbun

Epistle Reading: 1 Timothy 2:1-7

For Sunday, Sept. 19, 2010: Year C - Ordinary 25

P.O.S. is one of my favorite musician/songwriters. He’s an indie hip-hop artist from the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul whose real name is Stefon Alexander, and he writes some of the most brilliant cultural, political critical lyrics since Joe Strummer or Bob Dylan. I’m serious. He has this song that starts out with, First of all . . . (and then there is a pause) . . . [Screw] Bush.

First of All…

I know it’s juvenile, but it always gives me a rush of adrenaline every time I hear it. What can I say? It was deep in the morass of the second Bush administration when it came out, and it seemed like the whole world was completely going off the rails. It was like this speaking truth to power, prophetic acknowledgment that the King had abandoned the people.

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Act as Do Those Who Understand

August 9, 2010 By 2 Comments

What does it burn? When? And, most obscurely, why?

by Phyllis Tickle

Gospel Reading: Luke 12:49–56

For Sunday, August 15, 2010: Year C - Ordinary 20

Even as he speaks the horrific words of this text to those who follow him, Jesus is on his way toward Jerusalem and toward the end that is to be the beginning for which he came in the first place. In story and didactic observation and direct address, he has cajoled and harangued and entertained them for verse after verse and, in Luke’s Gospel, for chapter after chapter. Now he comes to the point:

“I came to bring fire to the earth,” he says, “and how I wish it were already kindled!”

Come again, Jesus?

“You thought I had come to bring peace to the earth? Heavens, no! Rather, I have come to bring division and dissent and interruption of all earth’s natural relationships!”

And having made that very clear and unequivocal statement, Jesus concludes by warning them to read with care the times in which He is speaking and in which they are, so far, anyway, only dispassionately listening. The era changes. Time grows short. Act as do those who understand. It is true, of course, that Luke is not the only Gospeler to record Jesus’ frequent comments about peace. John also quotes him on the subject, the most famous of those Johannine quotes being the much loved and probably too often cited: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.”

[Read more...]

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