Furthermore, even if I could figure out how to follow him, am I supposed to drop everything in order to do so? Is that what good disciples do? How can I ever live up to such a standard? How can I drop everything? What would that even mean for me, for you, for all of us who profess to be Christians?
THE GREATEST OF THESE REV. HEATHER M. HINTON Text: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 February 3, 2019 Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany (Year C) The church in Corinth was in trouble. For eighteen months, Paul had joined up with several coworkers such as Timothy and Silvanus, Phoebe, and Priscilla and her husband Aquila. Together they organized several […]
Jesus’ mission is the church’s mission. It’s your mission and it’s my mission; it’s what we agreed to when we were baptized or confirmed; it’s what we commit to when we pray “thy kingdom come”; and it’s what we’re fueled for by the bread and cup.
The chaff is a constellation of things: it’s all the habits and behaviors and attitudes that we’ve adopted over time to protect our vulnerability, to keep us from getting hurt. And our most vulnerable spots are the parts of ourselves we aren’t satisfied with; the parts of ourselves someone else or society has told us to be dissatisfied with; guilt or shame over things we’ve done or left undone. The chaff is our own voice or culture’s voice saying that deep down we just aren’t good enough.
Epiphany 2019 (Year C) This year our Epiphany celebration centered around Eugene Butler’s wonderful choral work, A Great Light: a Christmas cantata for SATB voices. Someday we’ll figure out the technology for our website so that you can hear us worship in song…until then, trust us: it was a celebration of light, full of joy, and […]
When we remember who we are and remember to try to act from that place of belovedness, then we will more and more display those characteristics which so beautifully describe our God. We will keep putting on those clothes until they fit us well and feel natural to us.
Around the turn of the first century, a man named Joseph lived and worked in this small but significant working-class village. Now, very little is known about Joseph of Bethlehem. In fact, by the end of the second century, Christians began to develop traditions about him just to fill in some of the uncomfortable blanks. These traditions – that he was a widower, or elderly, or had children by a first, now-deceased wife, and so on – are just that: traditions. It’s unlikely that much in these later traditions is historically accurate. But the traditions point to the human longing for details and stories and the ability to really picture what’s going on in the stories we’re told. If only the author of Matthew’s had been concerned with our insatiable curiosity about the Holy Family!
On this “Joy Sunday,” we’re going to hear the story of Mary, the mother of Jesus – that is, we’ll hear the parts of the story related to the Advent season. There is, of course, much more to her story, but we will save that for other days and other seasons. For today, in word and song, we will consider Mary, the maiden who became mother of our Savior Jesus Christ.
We tend to shy away from talk of repentance, and I think that’s primarily because we have loaded the word repentance with shame. In the word “repent” we hear accusation, we hear disdain, we hear harsh judgment with no mercy. We hear not that we did something bad, but that we are something bad. If we hear the command to repent often enough with all of those overtones of shame and unworthiness, then we come to fear that Jonathan Edwards was right: we are sinners in the hands of an angry god.
Christmas: the promise of hope, the birth of joy, the coming of the light of God into the world. Christmas is good news! So why are we hearing about signs, and distress among nations, and the roaring of the sea? Why the descriptions of people fainting from fear and foreboding, the prophecies of the heavens being shaken? Why the command to keep awake, be always ready, stay on guard? If this is supposed to be the season of good news, why all the gloom and doom?
