Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

The second Sunday in Easter: Growing in faith from our doubts John 20:19-31 This morning’s reading always follows Easter. It is at the opposite end of what Easter is: the human need for tangible proof. Between Easter and this Sunday’s story of doubting Thomas, we wrestle with the core of Christian faith versus the facts of the story. Where Easter is the celebration around an event that can’t be understood in rational terms, the story of Thomas is our natural reaction to it. Thomas voices what we feel at times or have dealt with, that is, an attempt to understand Jesus’ resurrection and our faith in purely rational terms. To echo last week’s theme, they both don’t make sense and aren’t supposed to, because faith in Jesus and his resurrection comes from a spiritual connection to them. And like Thomas, we struggle to balance our natural attraction to the facts, rather than balance them with a spiritual understanding of the resurrection. Thomas’ crisis is not so much a crisis...

Easter: Hope is not unfashionable Alleluia! The Lord has risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia! Easter is the celebration of Christ’s rising from his grave to be alive again. He died, he was buried in a tomb, and then he was alive again. He conquered death by dying and perpetuated life by becoming alive after. No, it doesn’t make sense. It isn’t supposed to. God can’t be quantified; God can’t be measured, or described, or put in a box for us to contain or limit. God is, and what God or Christ does is not meant to be understood the way that we understand the world. Christ’s resurrection is one of perhaps three core beliefs all Christians share, the other two being that Jesus was God’s Son, and that Jesus was born from an immaculate conception. These are the stakes that we put into the ground and say “This is where we begin.” Christmas and Easter are our open proclamation that we believe through faith, that we believe without proof, because proof is irrelevant when it comes to our so...

Good Friday: A day of transformation John 18:1 - 19:37 Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen. Jesus died for our sins. Throughout the Gospel of John, we hear that theme in Jesus’ words and his discussions with his followers and with the Jewish authorities. Jesus died for our sins, so that we are forgiven our sins, and are made right before God. But that isn’t obvious in the passion narrative read today. In the reading we just heard, Jesus is arrested in the garden of Gethsemane, Peter falls from grace in wielding his sword, and then denies his faith in Jesus three times. We see Jesus examined by Pilate and found innocent, but eventually turned over to the religious authorities to be crucified. And today we commemorate that terrible death, an unjust death from fear of his power and anger from his f...

Maundy Thursday: The Jesus Paradox John 13:1-17, 31b-35 Many years ago, when I worked in biomedical research, I was the lab technologist, handyman, purchasing agent, and data analyst. I juggled my responsibilities and kept the lab running and helping the post-doctoral students with their projects. I never said no to them or the faculty, only “Let me see when I have time.” I was relied upon as much as I depended on them to teach me what I needed to know. At the end of the day, I normally walked down the hall to the business manager’s office to ask if she (or anyone else) needed anything else from me before I left. Most of the time the answer was no, but occasionally there was, and I stayed until I got it done. I left that lab for another one with new people and very different relationships between the faculty, the business manager, and the technicians like me. For the first two or three weeks, I continued my habit of walking down to the business manager’s office to ask if there wa...

Ash Wednesday Matthew 6:1-6,16-21 Prayer is one of those funny things that we talk about doing all of the time, but I suspect that in reality, we don’t have a clear idea of what prayer actually is. Or, perhaps, we know how we pray, but we don’t really know how others pray. There are popular images of children, in their innocence, kneeling with their head down, hands together below their chin in an iconic posture of prayer. Or, there is the image of weathered hands in a praying position, drawn by Albrecht Duerer, accompanied by the apocryphal, emotion-laden legend that the hands were of his brother, who worked in the mines to finance Albrecht’s art training. Or, there is the woman I once encountered at a hospital chapel, who was kneeling on the floor with her arms propped up on the seat of a chair, praying out loud for the medical staff who were taking care of a relative. Her tone of voice was one of gentle pleading with someone who was sitting next to her, except that she was the ...

Palm Sunday: The celebration before the storm Palm Sunday concludes the 40 day fast we go through in Lent. It is a commemoration of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, where for a week (many scholars believe) Jesus preached until he was arrested, tried, convicted, tortured, and left to die on a commonly used Roman execution structure. In Israel, Judaism was not just a religion but a political system as well, where laws in the Torah were enforced as laws of the land. The Roman occupation and oversight allowed expression of religion and some self-governance as part of the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace. But, there were limits to Roman tolerance, and Jesus' challenge of how Jewish law was applied indiscriminately to people was a threat to that tolerance. Jesus also challenged the inequalities he saw, the injustice to the poor, the sick, those who were different, and those who were unpopular with the Jewish religious authorities. He dared the authorities to look differently at those they...

Fifth Sunday in Lent: Vows for the future Isaiah 43:16-21 During this Lenten season, I have explored the vows said for us at our baptism, and ones that we renew at least once a year. I have looked at them in the context of the scriptural readings assigned for each Sunday in Lent, and found that scripture does have something to say about each of them. The first two vows were resisting evil and repenting of evil when we do it, and seeking and serving Christ in all persons by loving our neighbors as ourselves. In the context of Jesus’ 40-day fast in the desert and temptation by the satan (with a little “s”), confession and sin and repentance is most effective when done in the loving presence of God. Loving our neighbors as ourselves means seeing ourselves as worthy of God’s love, receiving it, and then giving it to those around us. These are real acts of discipline that parallel Jesus’ discipline of saying no to temptation. The next baptismal vow of continuing the Apostle’s fellowsh...

The fourth Sunday of Lent     Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32     The last baptismal vow to be examined in the Lenten season is the vow of justice: Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being? What kind of justice is referred to in this vow is not always clear, but the gospel reading provides an illustration. It tells the story of the prodigal son, a story we have heard enough that it has become part of our cultural references. We have also heard many sermons and discussions about it, so that there is a risk of the story being too familiar. But to look at the story from the perspective of the baptismal vow provides a different dimension to it.     The main character in the story is the prodigal son himself, but the question around justice involves both brothers and their relationship. The question of what is just or unjust centers on the older brother and his reaction to the celebration of his younge...