Facing the whirlwind: A sermon for Transfiguration Sunday, 2 Kings 2:1-13

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2 Kings 2:1-13

This year’s short Epiphany season, the time after Christmas and before Lent, means that even this early in February it is already Transfiguration Sunday. This is the week of the year when we typically read the story of Jesus taking a few disciples up a mountain where they see him change before their eyes and hear the voice of God declare, “This is my Son, the Beloved!” 

We hear that story again this year, but the majority of our focus this year is shifting to one of the several “pre-quels” that sheds some light on the transfiguration. 2 Kings 2 tells of the prophet Elijah, one of the ancestors in faith who appears on the mountain to talk with Jesus during the transfiguration. Elijah is unique among prophets because his death is recorded with a dramatic, divine flair. With his student and successor Elisha watching, chariots and horses of fire come to earth to carry Elijah in a whirlwind to heaven. 

What do this stories of an encounter with divine power tell us about God’s presence in times of grief and transition?

The full worship video for this service is available here.

From personal faith to public action: A sermon on Mark 1:29-39

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Mark 1:29-39

During Pub Theology last week, while extending my welcome to the group of over 50 people who had gathered, the 1980s alternative rock song, “Personal Jesus,” by the band Depeche Mode came on in the brewery. It made my Gen X heart sing. It also gave me a spontaneous “way in” to our conversation that night about where and how we find meaning and purpose in our lives. 

The song is on my mind again as I’m think about the story we explored in worship, the story of Jesus healing Simon’s mother-in-law in the gospel according to Mark. It’s a very personal act of Jesus, emphasized by the intimacy of Jesus taking the woman by the hand, and yet it is surrounded by very public acts of healing and exorcism. Is Jesus Simon’s mother-in-law’s “Personal Jesus”? What does her response to the healing tell us about her own answer to that question? 

The worship video of this sermon is also available here.

A Different Kind of Kin(g)dom: A sermon based on Mark 1:14-20

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Mark 1:14-20

I mentioned last week that of the gospels, John has taken me the longest to connect with. This week we find ourselves in Mark, though, and Mark has long been my favorite. Maybe gospels are like children and we’re not supposed to have favorites, but I guess do. (Have a favorite gospel, I mean, not a favorite child.)

Mark’s gospel has a fast pace to it. For the grammarians among us, there are a lot of sentence fragments that start with “And then…”. The versions of shared stories that appear in Mark are typically short and lack some of the editorial detail or theological explanation. And yet, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a theological thread through Mark; it just means we get to piece it together from the way the stories are told and how the whole book is put together. I love this responsibility that is given to us, the readers, disciples of Jesus, the body of Christ. 

The story we explore this Sunday, the beginning of Jesus’ Galilean ministry and the calling of his first disciples (Mark’s version), gives us a huge hint about Mark’s theology and ultimate message about who Jesus is, why he lived, died, and lives again, and what it means to be his followers, his disciples.

The worship video for this sermon is available here. (The sermon is really from Mark, not Matthew, no matter what I said when introducing the scripture.)

Kin(g)dom Sight: A sermon for January 14, 2024, Martin Luther King, Jr Weekend, based on John 1:43-51

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The worship video for this sermon is available here.

John 1:43-51

Photo by wendel moretti on Pexels.com

It has taken me a while to warm to up to the gospel according to John. And by a while I don’t mean a few days this week in preparation for worship today. I mean like years, decades. Maybe it’s taken that long for my brain that was trained in the sciences to finally open up to the poetry and symbolism and mysticism in the fourth gospel. But I’m coming around to. Where I used to get frustrated, thinking, “Just say what you mean.” Now I’m more intrigued by how many different things are meant by the one thing that is said.

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Ministry Snapshots: Year End Examen

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One of my favorite spiritual practices, examen, comes from Ignatian spirituality, and gathering for worship on the last day of the calendar year became the perfect time to introduce this to the congregation. Examen is a technique of prayerful reflection on the events of a set period of time in order to detect God’s presence and discern God’s direction for us. The most common use of the examen is as a daily practice, yet it can also be used for longer periods of time that lend themselves for prayerful reflection. In worship we used a time of guided personal prayer to individually prayer the examen about the year that had past and the year ahead in a time. Inspired by Mary, who was known for “pondering” in her heart (Luke 2:19), and Simeon, whose prayerful eye saw God’s salvation in the baby Jesus brought to the temple (Luke 2:30), we looked into our lives and invited God’s leading into the new year.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

To craft the guided meditation I leaned heavily on two resources that I merged for leading the examen in a group setting.

“Examen Prayer for the Year,” provided on the blog of Loyola Press

“Praying the Examen with Others: a Struggle and Script,” on the blog On God and People by Jacob Tilstra

A Baby Story: A sermon based on Luke 2:1-20 for Christmas Eve

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Luke 2:1-20

In the late 1990s and early 2000s there was a TV show on The Learning Channel called “A Baby Story.” This 30 minute documentary-style show (I use that term loosely) would feature a family preparing to welcome a new baby. Each episode included interviews with parents, grandparents, siblings, and friends. Usually there was a visit to the doctor for a pre-natal visit. And then there was some little extra feature to highlight the preparations or celebrations that might be taking place, before the final (significantly edited) footage of the birth.

Photo by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash

When watching this show religiously (which I did), one of my favorite features was when the soon-to-be parent would walk the audience through the packing of their hospital bag.  It feels a little silly now, but I loved watching what people chose for comfort, what they threw in to keep themselves occupied just in case they had time, what they wanted to listen to while laboring, what they carried along for religious devotion, or what clothes they wanted the baby to wear when they were coming home. 

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Keep Alert: A sermon for the 1st Sunday of Advent,

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A worship video of this sermon is available here.

Isaiah 64:1-9
Mark 13:24-37

In case you’re wondering if you’re having deja vu, yes, this is, indeed, our fourth apocalyptic text in as many Sundays.  Three weeks ago there were quite a few similarities in the “punch line” of keep awake, when we heard the story from Matthew of the ten bridesmaids waiting for the bridegroom who was delayed. Then in the next two weeks there were parables – one of the talents that offered a vision of the kindom of God where the conventional economic system is turned upside down, and another of the sheep and the goats where the needs of the “least of these” are centered. These stories may not feel like “apocalypse,” but they are depictions of how we are called to live when we know that there is going to be a great reckoning and setting things right, but it hasn’t happened to completion just yet.

Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash

And now here on the fourth Sunday in a row, the first Sunday of a new Christian year, the first Sunday of Advent, the season of waiting for this coming of Christ, we have another description of what some call “the end times.” For us Presbyterians, who tend to be known for our orderliness, this is an awful lot of talk about the chaos of the unknown and unpredictable.  And yet, one of the commentaries I read a few weeks ago when thinking about the Matthew passage said “The expectation of Christ’s return is central to Christian living.”¹

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Stay Ready – A sermon on Matthew 25:1-13

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I was remembering recently a button that used to exist in the solitaire game software that came pre-installed on Microsoft computers. It was known as a “Boss button.” The idea was that if you were playing card games on your computer at work and your boss came by unexpectedly, you could hit this button and a meaningless spreedsheet with meaningless data would take over your screen, hiding the card game.  It was sort of a digital, “Quick! Look busy!” solution. 

The parable we encountered in worship today has a little bit of that “Quick! Look busy” feel to it.  Two groups of bridesmaids in the story have two different ways of waiting while the return of the bridegroom is delayed, leading us to think about what we do when when the “boss” isn’t around. How do we wait when the waiting starts to get longer than we expected? 

A worship video of this sermon is available here, and the manuscript can be found by clicking “Continuing reading” below.

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The Gift of the Law – A sermon on Exodus 20:1-17

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It’s a common Christian misconception to think the Old Testament is all about an angry, vengeful God, while the New Testament has a monopoly on love and grace. Often people will point to “all those rules and commandments” to support that kind of thinking. In this sermon, we look at the Ten Commandments, where they sit in the story of God’s love for God’s people and how they guide us to live in that love.

Exodus 20:1-17

The manuscript appears below.

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Are all welcome? – A sermon based on Acts 8:26-39

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Manoel Amaro, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped)

Acts 8:26-39

I wonder how the eunuch from Ethiopia came to visit the temple Jerusalem. We don’t know exactly what his relationship is with the faith of most temple worshipers, but somehow he came to be curious enough about the temple and what that takes place there, that he decided to travel all the way to Jerusalem to worship there.

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