Didn’t you wonder when you heard this story whether Jesus couldn’t just have quietly waited to heal the man the next day, or even later when there weren’t so many people around?   I did.   I mean, surely a few hours or a half-a-day couldn’t have made much difference to the man.  Why not just quietly go in and enjoy a nice worship service, not offend or anger anyone, keep controversy outside the place of worship… and just focus on the reaching out and healing at another time?   Surely Jesus could have managed to satisfy everybody here.  Why create the controversy, anyway?

Incredible as it may seem to us, Jesus just doesn’t seem that interested in avoiding controversy.  

I’m not sure that it’s true either, as some people suggest, that Jesus was a rabble-rouser, whose goal all along was to shake things up and challenge the status quo in every possible way.

The point is that something more important than the threat of controversy is at stake here.  The story centers on the clash between two ways of understanding what it means to be a faithful believer:   one seeing faithfulness defined by rules and practices and behavior – external, measureable things – and the other, Jesus, who wants to talk about the state of the heart. 

I love the simplicity of this story in Mark. A leper approaches Jesus and says essentially, “You could heal me, if you wanted to.” “Moved with pity,” the text tells us Jesus declared his willingness and healed the leper. Notice that the only thing that stands between the leper and wholeness is Jesus’ willingness and his willingness flows from his compassion. It is not accident that compassion is rooted in passion, those things which we feel deeply.

If we were to follow Jesus’ example, cultivating his character in ourselves, this pattern of consulting our passion and declaring our willingness, would result in releasing an incredible amount of energy not just in the life of the church, but in the world around us. I know that the temptation to dampen our passions is great, but we must resist it. Saying “no” frees up the time and energy for the things we feel deeply. But it doesn’t get us there. It opens us up for other possibilities, but life only begins with the “yes.” Taking up the cross is not the reason for discipleship. Death is not the goal. It’s resurrection that we after, and that never happens without the “yes” of our souls.

The only thing that stands between this congregation and a renewed sense of health and wholeness is our willingness, our desire as followers of Christ. That willingness is only released by passion, by compassion, by love. It’s in our love for Christ and the church that we will find the desire to say “yes” to the things that move us deeply.

read the whole sermon

... our theme this Lent, and this sermon series, is NOT about “character building” in the sense your dad meant when he told you that the hard physical labor of shoveling snow or mowing the lawn would teach you a work ethic and make you a better person.   It’s not just about being a better person; it’s about becoming more like Jesus… and that doesn’t happen through our efforts but only as we live more and more closely connected with him.

 We might protest that we couldn’t possibly be like Jesus… but remember that Jesus said,  “Follow me.”   “Do as I have done to you.”  “Love one another just as I have loved you.”  

 And the apostle Paul wrote:  “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ.”

 The idea isn’t that by doing a certain number of things that are like what Jesus did we will eventually become such good human beings that people will start mistaking us for Jesus.   Picture instead how small children do what their parent does – they imitate even gestures, the walk, the way the parent carries out daily tasks.  This is how they learn what it is to be human.  When we follow and observe and listen to Jesus closely enough so that we start acting like him, we too learn what it really means to be human.   

read the whole sermon

This is Mark’s gospel, where hardly a day passes before Jesus is moving on to a new town. This is Mark’s gospel whose favorite word is “immediately.” Jesus is constantly on the move, trying to stay ahead of the crowd, though without success. From this point forward he moves quickly to Jerusalem, passing through Galilee, Capernaum, Judea, Jericho and Bethany. But between the blow-up with Peter and what we call the transfiguration today, there is this six day period of silence. A gospel whose essence is movement pauses for six days at its very center. All along, Mark has hurried us from town to town, from teaching to teaching, from miracle to miracle, and with three words, “six days later” brings us to a screeching halt. These three words are the cue for Mark’s readers to slow down and take time to think about what just happened and this next thing about to happen.

How like our own lives! Every day filled with something new to learn, some activity to attend, some need to address.

read the whole sermon

This is a wildly improbable story; every part is played for laughs.  You have to appreciate the humor and the irony to really grasp the point.   You can’t read it with the voice of rationality in your head telling you “this doesn’t make sense” or “it couldn’t have happened like that.”  It’s supposed to be ridiculous – if you can’t see the ridiculousness of it, you will miss the point.

 A favorite motif – a joke, almost – of scripture is the “outsider” who is unexpectedly faithful, while the person or people who are supposed to know and do God’s will are clueless.  No story carries this theme to the degree that the book of Jonah does.

 As you read this story, you keep thinking, “is there any hope for these people?” All of the characters seem to be in a bad way.  There doesn’t seem to be much hope for any of them -  Jonah, the sailors, the people of Ninevah… and what about the people of Israel for whom the story was told? 

What I think is so interesting about John’s account of Andrew, Simon Peter, Phillip and Nathanael, and their first steps in following Jesus is that NONE of the things we’d be likely to name as part of “following Jesus” are in evidence.   We read not a word about feeding the hungry, speaking up for the oppressed, changing our lives, being faithful in church attendance… nothing at all.

What’s even stranger is that when Jesus says “follow me” they do just that, with almost no questions.   Andrew and the other guy have only John the Baptist’s word for it that Jesus is the one sent from God; Simon comes to see Jesus because Andrew is so excited about him.  Jesus finds Phillip and says “follow me,” and with that Phillip goes off to tell Nathanael that Jesus is the one the prophets wrote of.  Nathanael is pretty skeptical at first but he’s very impressed by the fact that Jesus seems to know that a) he’s an honest guy and b) he was sitting under a fig tree at some previous, unspecified time.  So they follow Jesus, never mind that his invitation is rather short on specifics.   Wouldn’t you think they ask something?  (“What’s your plan?  Where’s the money coming from?  What are the main points of your platform?  What is it you hope to accomplish?  What’s our job description here?  What’s the itinerary? Can I see the fine print in the contract?  Can I have some time to consider the pros and cons of your offer?”)  But no, they just go along without another word, without the least idea of what this is all going to be about.

How different Jesus’ baptism is from the other baptisms John performs, which Mark describes as baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins!  If we forget where all this leads for a moment and just take Jesus’ baptism at face value, I am struck by how similar the affirmations here are to the affirmations we make when we celebrate baptism today.  In baptism, we affirm that we are children of God and loved by God. As the heavens were opened and the Spirit descended upon Jesus, so we believe that the Spirit of God rests upon us, setting up residence we might say within us.  And we believe that we begin this new life with God’s good pleasure. Though we do not rule out the importance of repentance for the life of faith, we begin with the presumption of God’s forgiveness based on grace, not individual effort. In truth, these words might be said at the baptism of any person: “You are my child, the Beloved. In you I am well-pleased.”

 So I wonder about these scholars who seem so anxious to get on with Jesus’ life in order to discern what God’s pleasure at this moment was all about. Isn’t it enough, I ask, that he came from Galilee to the river Jordan in order to be baptized by John? Isn’t it enough that Jesus, knowing who he was, did not set himself above others, but submitted himself to the same practices that hailed the coming of God’s kingdom?

The year the magi found the Christ child was a revolutionary year, not a year of tinkering, but a year of great change. News of their arrival in Jerusalem must have reached Herod before their audience with him. Herod must have been exceedingly anxious when he learned that they were not there to visit him, but the new king, the King of the Jews. The people trembled for fear at what their unpredictable ruler might do. But the magi are bold in their endeavor to find this child. They do not give up their search when the new king is not where they expected to find him. They go back to following the star until it rests in an unlikely place. Herod is caught unaware in this revolutionary time and his efforts to hold on to the past, though painful to many, fail to hold the changes at bay. He missed the birth. The magi did not.

read the whole sermon