March 2017 Archives

Sermon delivered at Lutheran Church of the Cross in Berkeley. 

March 26 - 4th Sunday in Lent

"Seeing".  Text is from John 9:1-41

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Good morning to you my sisters and brothers in Christ, saints and sinners, children of God.

This morning's gospel reading is a pretty long one, one of the longest in our lectionary outside of Christmas and Easter. And it has another remarkable thing about it. Look here, we first have Jesus giving this man eyesight, and then he is brought before the Pharisees, questioned mercilessly... his parents are questioned, they tell them that he's all grown up, he can speak for himself, and then they question him once more and finally when they don't get the answers they want, they expel him from the synagogue. 

And after all that, Jesus seeks him out, and finds him.  And with all that happens in the interim, it is the longest absence of Jesus in the entire gospel, with the exception perhaps, depending on how you look at it, of the Easter Narrative. 

Sermon delivered at Lutheran Church of the Cross in Berkeley. 

March 19 - 3nd Sunday in Lent

"Laid Bare".  Text is from John 4:5-42

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Good morning to you my sisters and brothers in Christ, saints and sinners, children of God.

The narrative of the Samaritan woman at the well is gorgeous, and so full of possibilities in its own right.  We have Jesus walking in Samaria, and he comes to this city and conveniently, while his disciples are away getting food, he stops at Jacob's Well, where he encounters this woman. To understand the tension, it helps to know a little bit about the different characters.  While Jesus is a Galileean, he is nevertheless specifically Jewish, just of a rural variety. And furthermore he is, at least to his disciples, a rabbi, a teacher, kind of a holy man. Samaratans like this woman are of a different breed of people altogether. It's not that they're that different from Jews, their religion stems from worship of the same God that the Jews worship.... Yahweh. But for the Jews, Yahweh is at the Temple in Jerusalem, and all worship must take place there. For Samaritans, the worship takes place on Mount Gerazim. The other major difference belongs to the distinction of the Old Testament, because the Samaratans were the ones who remained in the land of Israel during the Babylonian exile, and believed that their version of the face remain uncorrupted from Persian and Babylonian influences. 

And from these minor differences comes a major break, because the Jews considered the Samaritans, in many ways, worse than Gentiles. For a holy man such as Jesus to be speaking with a Samaritan woman was simply unheard of, particularly on his own. It was a violation of several laws and more significantly, social customs. 

Sermon delivered at Lutheran Church of the Cross in Berkeley. 

March 12 - 2nd Sunday in Lent

"Born Again, Again?".  Text is from John 3:1-17

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Good morning to you my sisters and brothers in Christ, saints and sinners, children of God.

We move into a different part of the gospels with today's text and the next several Sundays, going from Matthew to John's gospel, where we have some very interesting revelations play out in the text.  

In today's reading we have a visit from a Pharisee named Nicodemus. It's no mistake that this important encounter is with one from the generally reviled group of people known as Pharisees, but Nicodemus is special. He appears to either be genuinely trying to understand the words that Jesus is telling him or at the very least investigating Jesus for other purposes, but having a worthwhile dialogue with him. 

And in the midst of this dialogue, Nicodemus is bringing all of his own preconceptions to this encounter with Christ and has basically closed is mind to all possibility that Jesus has to offer. Jesus says that nobody is going to see God's kingdom without having been born from above. Nicodemus is perplexed. Birth happens once, right? What do you expect to crawl back into your mother's womb and go through it all over again? Jesus clarifies with a lengthier explanation, that things of the flesh are of the flesh and things of the Spirit are of the Spirit, and that one must be born of water and spirit, that is, "From above" in order to enter the kingdom. Now Nicodemus is astonished. What in the world is Jesus telling him? Jesus castigates Nicodemus, he is a teacher of Israel one who is supposed to understand Godly things and he doesn't get it? 

Sermon delivered at Lutheran Church of the Cross in Berkeley. 

March 5 - 1st Sunday in Lent

"The Wilderness".  Text is from Matthew 4:1-11

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Good morning to you my sisters and brothers in Christ, saints and sinners, children of God.

These words from Matthew herald us into our Lenten journey. As soon as Jesus is Baptized by John the Baptist in chapter three of Matthew, he is brought into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit where he is to meet the devil for testing. There he fasts for forty days and is understandably quite hungry at the end of that time. The devil, also named the tempter or tester here, then presents him with three different tests.

Sermon delivered at Lutheran Church of the Cross in Berkeley. 

March 1, 2017 - Ash Wednesday  

"Carrying the Message".  Text is from  Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21 

Click here for sermon audio 20170301 Sermon Ash Wednesday.mp3