Author: Maggie Gillespie

1 Peter 3:13-22 John 14:15-21 One Sunday years ago I took a small group of college students to a little Quaker church. Actually, it’s called a meeting house.  This was in Millville, Pennsylvania, the Millville Friends Meeting, which has been there a long time – since 1795.  It is a very small, simple, old building with plain wooden pews.  In the front of the room there’s no pulpit because most Quakers don’t have preachers.  They are known for worshiping in silence and waiting on the Holy Spirit to speak to them. When someone feels inspired by the Spirit to share something, he or she will simply stand up and say what is on their heart and mind. There were a couple of long benches in the front of the room that faced the pews, sort of like a choir loft, I guess.  We were invited to sit there so that […]

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Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16 John 14:1-14 Lyndon Johnson had a long and prolific career in elected politics before he became president. He represented Texas in the House of Representatives for 12 years, then the Senate for another 12 years. Johnson was well-loved in Texas for serving his constituents well, especially in and around Johnson City. Back when I lived in Texas, driving through this area of the Texas Hill Country, I noticed a surprising number of little rest stops along the road. They weren’t fancy like the rest areas we are used to now, with all kinds of amenities for weary and bored travelers. These rest areas consisted of a couple of picnic tables and benches, a trash can. They were well-tended and attractive. And they popped up about every mile or so. One could argue that this was excessive, a profligate number of rest stops. But no one could ever […]

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Acts 2:42-47 John 10:1-10 The book of Acts is really special to me because it is the only book in the Bible that tries to give us a glimpse of just how it all began. It says to the reader, come along with me and I’ll show you what it was like, how this great thing we call the church got started. As I read it, I feel like I can hear the narrator saying, “Man, wasn’t that a time!” Day by day, wonderful things were happening in their midst. This reading from the second chapter is in the very beginning of the beginning. The resurrected Jesus has ascended, the Holy Spirit has descended, and the church is alive. Peter preaches a sermon that everyone understood in their own language – and I take that to mean simply that the Spirit was breaking through all the barriers. People were hearing […]

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Luke24:13-35 The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a beautiful line: Christ plays in ten thousand places. And it seems to be so in the Easter season. In these days following the resurrection, it seems like he is everywhere at once. Better than when he was bound by human flesh! He is in the garden, in the upper room, at the lakeshore, on the road to Emmaus. Apparently, all at once. Here we are still in the same day we were in two weeks ago. For you and me, the Easter lilies are starting to die back, and the jellybeans are all eaten. But the gospel still has us on the day of Christ’s resurrection. One of the things that happened on this day was a couple of the disciples walking to a place called Emmaus. I wish I could tell you something about this place called Emmaus. I have done […]

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Acts 2:14a, 22-32 John 20:19-31 There is a cute scene in the middle of The Sound of Music, when Maria and Georg first express their love for each other. They are sharing their memories of the moment when they each knew they loved the other one. When I was little, I thought it was embarrassing, but as an adult I think it is my favorite scene. Don’t we just love to remember exactly when something good first began? The moment I knew I loved you. The moment I knew I wanted to be a mother, or a father. The moment our friendship began. These are moments that stick in our memory and we visit them now and then, for the pleasure of them. The moment when we experienced the beginning of a new thing – a life-changing thing. Occasionally, the new thing is really big, bigger than a personal relationship […]

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Matthew 28:1-10 Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed. Powerful words we say to one another on Easter morning. But only powerful because we know the story behind it  – a story that gives meaning to everything. The particular story of this day is the one about the women who came to the tomb early. They came to tend the body of their beloved, but it was gone. The tomb was empty. Angels appeared and said to the women, “He is risen; you will see him again in Galilee, the place where it all began.” It goes back to Galilee, where his ministry began. But there is much more to it than that, isn’t there? It goes back to Bethlehem, where he was born – this child called Immanuel, God with us. Because God so loved the world. It goes back to Bethlehem. But it goes back much further, doesn’t […]

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Matthew 21:1-11  We wrapped up our Bible study for the season last Wednesday. We made it all the way through the Old Testament, from Genesis to Malachi. It really felt like an accomplishment. I kind of wished I had special t-shirts to hand out, saying something like “I Survived the Old Testament Bible Study.” In our last session we spent some time in the later prophets, those with a very far ranging vision – those prophets who speak of God’s ultimate intention for the world. One of these is Zechariah, who gets an honorable mention today. These visionary prophets were living and writing during a time when it seemed like something big was afoot, cosmic shifts were imminent. These were the centuries just before Jesus was born. I think it must have felt like the world was about to change. It was. Most people, though, had no idea why – […]

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Ezekiel 37:1-14 John 11:1-45 I remember the time one of my kids decided to run a marathon. He didn’t just lace up his shoes one morning and go out to the starting line. He prepared. He followed a rigorous training plan – a very impressive one. So, he thought he was ready for it, and I did too. But it was harder than he expected it to be.  He told me later that at a certain point, he was in so much pain with every step he could barely go on. In distance running they call that “hitting the wall,” when the pain and fatigue are overpowering.  I have heard it said that it’s like your body and your mind are having a conversation.  Your body says, “Look, you’ve had me out here for hours, running hard.  I am really, really hurting right now so I think we should just […]

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Ephesians 5:8-14 John 9:1-41  [Note about the text: There are many players in this story of Jesus healing the young man with blindness, and it should be noted that all of them are Jews. This is important because at one point in the story we are told that the young man’s parents are “afraid of the Jews.”  When John writes this he is speaking to the church that existed decades later, at the time he was writing. Many years after Jesus was crucified, his disciples were expelled from their Jewish community, which was very painful for them. From that perspective, this is a story about the pain of feeling excluded, perhaps the pain of being unseen.] I don’t know if it is accurate to call this the story of Jesus healing a blind man. Maybe it should be called a story about all the ways people take issue with Jesus […]

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Genesis 12:1-4 John 3:1-17 All of us have moments when we do impulsive things. Like, when your friend says, “Let’s go out for ice cream!” and you weren’t planning to do that, you were actually planning to go home and do laundry, but then you thought, “Ice cream? Why not? You only live once, right?” We have all done something impulsive once in a while. But probably not leaving your home and walking off toward an unknown destination. I’ll bet you haven’t done that. I wonder what Abram thought when God called him to walk away from his home and his people and go to a place God would show him.  There must have been something – or a few things – on his mind. But we don’t know.  The text doesn’t say.  It just says that Abram went, as the Lord told him. I try to imagine why. Maybe […]

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