A Different Kind of King

Luke 23:33-43 There are moments when you look around and see some very clear signs that all is not right with the world. Actually, at these moments, that might be an appalling understatement. One might rather say that all is messed up with the world. At times. In our Bible study we saw it this past week as we journeyed through the book of Judges, watching how Israel fell further and further into madness and darkness – maybe hurtling back toward that condition where Genesis begins, when God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep – Before the time when God began creating order out of chaos. We see it again in this story from Luke’s gospel. We have heard this story so many times, haven’t we? Every year during the season of Lent we travel down this road […]

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Things That Last

Isaiah 65:17-25 Luke 21:5-19 Recently, a friend described to me how it felt for him when he saw his childhood church building on fire. He was well into adulthood, married, and ordained to ministry. He no longer attended the church he grew up in. He was pastoring a different church in another city. But when he heard that the old church was on fire it shook him to his core. He said to his wife that he wanted to be there. He knew he couldn’t do anything, but he just wanted to bear witness. So he got behind the wheel, his wife in the passenger seat, and he began driving back to his old hometown. As they got close, he could see the flames as they overtook the old building. He told me it was so shocking he almost wrecked the car. He said, “I knew that it was only […]

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We Have Some Questions

Job 19:23-27 Luke 20:27-38 I just read a book called The Brief History of the Dead. It takes place in a city that is very much like cities we know. It has cafes and libraries and shops and parks and apartment buildings. There are taxis and delivery trucks, people in cars, people on bikes and skateboards. The city is full of people, all kinds of people doing all kinds of things that people do. New people are arriving all the time, this is how it is in a big city. Everyone has a story to tell about how they got there – every journey different from the others. But one thing they have in common is that they are all surprised to find themselves there. They are all from somewhere else. And when they arrive, each one has to begin their life again in this new place. Some of them find […]

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The Blessing and the Woe

Luke 6:20-31 There is a story called Ordinary Grace, written by William Kent Krueger. Some of you may recognize the title, because we read it in our monthly book discussion group several years ago. The story is told from the point of view of a man named Frank looking back on one particular summer in his childhood. It was 1961 in a small town in Minnesota. He was 13 years old, his brother Jake was 9. And in that summer, they confronted death for the first time. It wasn’t as though they knew nothing of death, actually. Their father was a minister, and they had been to plenty of viewings and funerals in their childhood already. But this summer was different. There were four deaths this summer for these young boys: lives taken by tragic accident, by violence, by unknown causes. Four deaths they met at close proximity. All four, […]

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