Time to Update!
Genesis 22:1-14 Psalm 13 Romans 6:12-23 Matthew 10:40-42 Why did God tell Abraham to sacrifice Isaac? The traditional way to read this story that God wanted to test Abraham’s faith, to see if he was really willing to sacrifice his son to God… Does that sound like the God that Jesus talked about? Does that sound like the God who is love? Not so much. Many contemporary scholars read it rather differently. They see this story as a pivotal point…
Losing in Christ
Genesis 21:8-21 Romans 6:1b-11 Matthew 10:24-39 I am very grateful to have colleagues with whom to share the sometimes daunting privilege of preaching. When I looked at this morning’s readings, I wished that one of them had offered to preach today! These are tough readings. Our Old Testament readings this summer follow the saga of Abraham and Sarah, the great ancestors of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Today we heard the disturbing story of Hagar and Ishmael. Although God had promised…
Work and Sabbath (Slow Church)
Today we come to the next sermon in our series based on Slow Church – cultivating community in the patient way of Jesus. A slow church is not one which is very slow to do anything or where the services are extremely long because they are so slow paced. No, slow church is a way of doing church that is locally sustained, sustainable and sustaining. It is a church which develops its own unique way of doing things and its…
The Dance of Trinity
Today’s Scriptures all point to the Trinity, even though the word itself isn’t in the Bible. Genesis 1:1-2:4 Six centuries before Jesus was born, an unknown poet-priest imagined God at the beginning of time: hovering over the void, creating life out of chaos. Sun, moon, and stars are born; the earth is formed, with its mountains and seas; plants spring up, animals begin to roam the earth, and human beings are created. When we read this particular verse (Genesis 1:26),…
Habits of the Heart
Happy Birthday! Today is Pentecost, the birthday of the church. This is the point when God’s mission of creation and redemption began to be manifest in the church. Of course it wasn’t an organization or an institution at that point, it was just a group, but an identifiable group, of Jesus’ disciples. They were all together in one place when the Spirit came upon them. And soon they weren’t locked in a room anymore – they were out in the…
Wholeness (Slow Church 3)
This morning I’m continuing with the sermon series based on the book Slow Church. The title Slow Church is a riff on the Slow Food movement which, unlike fast food, provides locally and sustainably sourced food. Today when we talk about whole food we think of the grocery chain, but before that, whole foods referred to food which was un-processed and often organically and locally produced. Today we’ll be thinking about wholeness in the life of the faith community. Wholeness…
Narrative Theology #1
I have two concrete early memories of church from my childhood, one fairly happy, and one much less so. The happy memory is of attending services at my grandmother’s small Presbyterian church in LaSalle, Michigan. To a child, church isn’t necessarily the most interesting way to spend an hour on a Sunday morning, but I was a reasonably compliant and well-behaved kid, and I liked to please my grandmother. So, we went. I can still remember the smell of that…
Wobbling but not Falling
Almost every week I talk with my dear friend Rebecca in Scotland. Sometimes when I ask how she’s doing she says “I had a major wobble this week.” A major wobble. A major wobble is when things seem to get out of control and temporarily beyond our emotional capacity to handle. In some ways, I think we at St Ben’s have been having a major wobble. Two of our beloved members have died in the last few months – Elizabeth…