Now, I know you might be wondering why I’m talking about sausages and phrases that started out in the 1600s but evolved into something else over time. After all, isn’t the Gospel today about this famous conversation with Nicodemus about being “born again?” Doesn’t it include the famous line, “For God so loved the world?” What’s this about pudding?
Imagine for a moment that you are in a desert. Not just what we experience outside of this town we live in, but an emotional and spiritual desert in which you feel isolated from others. Where you feel that you are alone, with no one to talk to, and nothing that feeds your soul with freshness or joy. Imagine that you are in this place, and now think of what would be your biggest desire.
For most of us, it would likely be that we would want to be anywhere else but that desolate space. We would believe that what we are experiencing now is not what we should be experiencing. That anyplace other than this desolate wilderness is better than where we are now.
And so, back to today’s passage: Jesus is standing here with Moses and Elijah. A cloud comes down from heaven, and this cloud overshadows them and a voice from the cloud says, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” And the disciples got scared and fell to the ground. Three terrified men on a mountain. When they finally looked up, Moses and Elijah were gone. Only Jesus remained.
New. And revolutionary. In today’s Gospel, Jesus comes along and says, “I’m not here being avant-garde. I don’t have anything new to give you. Instead, I’m here to fulfill the law and the prophets, not get rid of them.”
Jesus preached hope, compassion, and living simply and generously. The fact that some people want to reject these words of Christ and try to rewrite them into something they find more acceptable should make all of us question what is going on with the state of our union as followers of Christ.
John is standing there with his own disciples, and as Jesus passes by, he says to those disciples, “This is the Lamb of God who takes away all the sin of the world.”…
The two disciples heard John say this, and started following Jesus.
Apparently, though, they were following behind him from a distance, because when Jesus noticed that they were following him, he turned around, and said, “Hey! Guys. Why are you following me?”
When I did my first baptism as a priest, we had a minor crisis. As I poured water on the baby girl’s head, she began to cry. That’s when I realized that the water was cold. She did not stop crying until we were able to get a blanket over her head again and warm her up. At my second baptism, I tried to avoid the same mistake, and, because we were renting a community hall at the time, I heated up some water on the stove in the kitchen, and hoped that it wouldn’t cool off too much before the service. Just before the baptism, I checked the water, and it was a beautifully nice temperature. When I began pouring the water over the baby girl’s head, guess what? She began to cry. I decided that there were probably two explanations for this: 1) baby girls don’t like me, or 2) baby girls don’t like having water poured on their heads when they are comfortably resting in their mothers arms, half asleep. I prefer the second explanation.
As I looked at the Gospel reading for today, I was torn with all the directions that a sermon could go. The Gospel is about Joseph, Mary, and Jesus escaping the violence of Herod’s jealousy, as he seeks to kill the child Jesus. They escaped through a dream that Joseph had, and which protected him and his family. And then, the gospel concludes with another dream in which Joseph is told that it is now safe, and that he can bring his family back to Israel. And then again, yet another dream warns him not to go back to Bethlehem, but instead sends him off to a town called Nazareth.
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Lectionary Readings: Year A, First Sunday after Christmas There’s a story I heard once, and I’m sure many of you can relate to at least a part of the story. A father and his son are at home together, the father trying to get some work done, and the son is pestering his father with…