Lectionary Readings: Year A – Proper 22 Today’s Gospel gets presented to us as a parable, but it’s actually what we would call an allegory. What’s the difference, you ask? A parable is a short story focused on human experience in order to teach a moral or spiritual lesson. An allegory is a story where…
Lectionary Readings: Year A – Proper 20 If you came in here today feeling the world is spiraling out of control, you wouldn’t be alone. Any time we watch the news, we are inundated with stories of death, destruction, mayhem. Of theft, of fraud, or just people taking advantage of others. It seems, sometimes, like…
Lectionary Readings: Year A – Proper 19 Before we get into this parable in the Gospel, let’s remember the story of a minor prophet named Jonah, son of Amittai. God came to Jonah and told him to go to Nineveh, because the city was exceedingly wicked. And Jonah jumped up and immediately bought a ticket…
Lectionary Readings: Year A, Proper 18 Years ago I was listening to a husband and wife talking about their first few months as a married couple. Most of you may have a similar story, though maybe not as in depth as these two. It all started with the toilet paper roll. The husband liked the…
Lectionary Readings: Year A – Proper 17 Sometimes the way the lectionary splits things up is a bit odd. The readings we have today are a direct continuation of the conversation between Jesus and the disciples that we heard last week. And, instead of keeping the conversation in one reading, it was split into two.…
Lectionary Readings: Year A – Sixth Sunday in Easter One of the things my friends and I in college liked to do was to use fake church names that let people know that rather than going to church we instead decided to stay at home. You’ve probably heard a bunch of these. “Oh yeah, today…
Children, it is the last hour! As you have heard that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. – 1 John 2:18 When I was growing up, one of the things that seemed to be on everyone’s mind was this notion of the Antichrist, since, according to some big names, Jesus was coming…
This morning, we celebrate the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. This is the story we heard at the beginning of the service, in which Jesus rides into the city on a donkey, while people lay down palms before him, and shout “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”
And now, we are about to read the passion of Jesus, broken into parts for a more dramatic reading. You yourselves have the parts, at times, of the soldiers, the crowds, or the bystanders. There are actually two readings that we can choose for the passion reading – and one of them is a little over twice the size of what we will be reading. We are reading just a portion of the larger reading.
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.