Author: Maggie Gillespie

Matthew 16:13-20  A pastor named Ryan Burge has been making a name for himself – although not for pastoral work. Ryan left his full-time ministry in the American Baptist Church some years ago and now works in academia as a demographer. He studies and writes about the numbers. And the numbers tell Ryan that the middle is falling out of the church. His research finds that the church is becoming increasingly polarized – which is not surprising, because our society is growing increasingly polarized. But one thing I found interesting: Ryan attributes this change in the church to the decline in the mainline denominations, including the PC(USA). Membership in our denomination – along with others like the United Methodist, the Episcopalian, the United Church of Christ, the Evangelical Lutherans, and the American Baptists – has been declining for many years now. These churches were at one time the backbone of […]

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Genesis 45:1-15 Some years ago When I was a campus minister, I knew a student named Megan – a very dear young woman. She had many beautiful qualities, but one that really endeared her to me was this ability Meagan had to find the silver lining in everything. Megan could find something hopeful in every disappointment, and she would always say: “In a way, I’m glad this happened,” and then she would tell me how she had found some new opportunity in the setback. Megan had a talent for reframing her disappointments. Megan had her share of disappointments, thankfully all of them the non-life-threatening kind. I don’t know how she would have handled a real crisis, the kind of thing Joseph was thrown into again and again and again. I hope she never has to. So much has happened to Joseph since he was trotted off to Egypt with the […]

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Genesis 37:1-28 When we reach the story of Joseph, we know we are near the end of this Genesis narrative. Let’s consider for a moment where it has taken us. From the beginning, when God created the world as we know it, to the calling of a man and his family, to the formation of a people, Israel, and now to the shaping of a state. It is not the state of Israel, of course – Joseph’s story takes us to Egypt. But it is the first story about living in a large society, about a nation with power to govern and organize and care for a people. The story of Joseph is really much more than a story about one individual. Sunday school lessons love Joseph and his coat, which may or may not have been colorful. There are actually more ways of translating the description of Joseph’s coat […]

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Matthew 14:13-21 Every Sunday morning we take a bit of the scriptures to read and proclaim for the day. And so often it is the case that the passage begins with words that will pique our curiosity, as they do today. “Now when Jesus heard this…” And you wonder: What did Jesus hear? Why did he withdraw from everyone? What happened that he felt the need to be alone? What he heard was that his friend John had been executed by Herod. John the Baptizer – his cousin, according to Luke; the one who had prepared the way for Jesus’ ministry, baptizing and proclaiming that one greater than he was coming; John, the one who baptized Jesus. He had been arrested by Herod because Herod did not like what John was saying, nor did Herod’s wife. John was a prophet and he often said things that were offensive. The truth […]

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Matthew 13:31-52 More than two decades ago when I was going through the process of ordination to ministry, our denomination was going through a process of its own. At that time, there was a lot of conflict, competing forces wanting to shape the way the church would look, feel, and move in the world going forward. It was mostly about whether or not the church would fully embrace our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. We were in the thick of this controversy when I went before the presbytery as a candidate for ministry to be examined. In this process, all the ministers of the presbytery were free to ask me any questions they wanted that in any way pertained to my faith. The first person who rose to ask a question wanted to know what I thought about salvation. He began by saying that he knew the idea of universal salvation […]

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Genesis 25:19-34 Matthew 13:1-9 When we were little, my older sister and I convinced our younger sister that her duty as the youngest child was to wait on us; run down to the kitchen and get us a snack if we were hungry, even run down to the 7-Eleven if we had a sudden craving for Doritos or Laffy-Taffy. We had our moments when we were bad, I am ashamed to say. Older siblings often dominate the younger ones because they’re bigger, smarter, stronger – at least for a while.  But sometimes even when things even out; when the younger siblings are as big and strong and smart as the older siblings they still let themselves be dominated, simply because they are used to it.  It’s the way things have always been. If you ever see a younger sibling gain any advantage over the older sibling, it’s probably because they carefully watched […]

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Hebrews 10:23-25 Genesis 22:1-14 There are some stories that you don’t really want to know. Like William Styron’s story, Sophie’s Choice. Sophie was a Polish woman during the Second World War. She was sent to Auschwitz with her young son and daughter. The defining moment in this story is one of Sophie and her children, standing in line with all the other prisoners, waiting to be processed when a German officer approaches her. He offers Sophie a choice: which one of your children should die? Choose or they will both be taken. She chose her daughter. Then there is Toni Morrison’s story, Beloved. The character Sethe is a runaway slave living in Cincinnati with her four children. When the master hunts her down, Sethe grabs her children and runs to the toolshed. She knows she would rather they not live than to see them returned to slavery and so she […]

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Genesis 21:8-21 1 Peter 1:3-9 You might not know much about Hagar, because the story of Genesis doesn’t make her a main character. Although I would argue she ought to be. Hagar is first introduced in Chapter 16 of Genesis. Years have already passed since God first called Abraham on this journey, making promises about descendants that would surpass the number of stars in the sky. Yet even now Sarah remains childless. God occasionally returns to reiterate the promise to Abraham, but nothing happens. And so, not terribly surprising to anyone, Sarah decides to take action. Hagar is a woman who is enslaved to her. She is Egyptian, presumably young and healthy, so Sarah decides she will take a chance on her. In those times, men often took more than one wife – for the sake of being fruitful and multiplying. And a woman who held another woman enslaved, could […]

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Genesis 18:1-15 Romans 5:1-8 Lately I have become aware of one of my personal flaws. I like efficiency, probably a little too much. I like things that are scheduled. Starting things on time. And ending them on time. Although I have to admit that session meetings often run too long. But I try to be on time. As if my life depended on it. As if the schedule were the most critical thing. But this story of Abraham has got me thinking about this, questioning this. Because what is time, really? To our God, what is time? Last week I heard someone say: “We serve a wildly inefficient God.” This is true. Efficiency was not God’s concern in the story of Abraham and Sarah, was it? As we heard last week, God waited until Abraham was 75 years old before calling him out to a new life. And in the […]

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