Author: Maggie Gillespie

Matthew 2:1-12 I wonder if you all received what you wanted to receive this Christmas. Perhaps you received some surprises. Good surprises, I hope. I have a childhood memory of opening a gift from my mother and being disappointed by it. It wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want to be a rude and ungrateful child, but I couldn’t seem to hide my disappointment. She kept watching me and she asked, “Don’t you like it?” I think I said yes, I do, but not very convincingly. I was disappointed in the moment. Later I grew to like the gift very much, and I tried to tell her that often. Although I don’t think it made up for the poor way I received it. Receiving gifts can be fraught with difficulties. Very often there are expectations we have with one another – that the gifts given and received should be approximately […]

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Matthew 2:13-23 Like many families, in our home we want everything to be beautiful and joyful and satisfying on Christmas. We want everyone to feel comfortable and loved and content. And we do a pretty good job of it, it seems. Yet the real truth of Christmas has the power to come through any shiny veneer we might put on it. In Matthew’s gospel, we hear about the angel who came to Joseph and told him not to be afraid; the one who is responsible for Joseph being there when Mary’s child was born. And we hear about the Magi who followed the star all the way to Bethlehem where they knelt before the child and offered gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Both are beautiful pieces of the story we cherish and retell each year. But no sooner have the Magi left when we hear that an angel has […]

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I learned something new this week: Christmas Eve marked 70 years that the North American Aerospace Defense Command has been tracking Santa’s sleigh. According to the story I read, it started in 1955 when a child tried to call a Santa hotline, but accidentally called this defense agency and got Colonel Harry Shoup on the line. Initially the Colonel was confused, but he recovered quickly and realized the opportunity here. From that point on they made it their responsibility to track Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve, providing regular updates on the sleigh’s location. Every year, they answer phone calls from children around the world, assuring them that all is well and Santa is on his way. It’s a truly unique way that our military offers protection and assurance to the citizens of the world. A kinder, gentler face of our fighting forces – but apparently all in line with the […]

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Isaiah 7:10-16 Matthew 1:18-25 I can still remember some of the things people said to us before our first child, Kira, was born. Everybody had some kind of advice – some good, some not so great. One of the things I remember was you should go out on dates, do adult things, just take advantage of the fact that your time is your own. Because that life is about to end. This is one of the things you sacrifice when you have children. But it’s only one of the things. Lots of things change when you have children no one ever tells you about. You only find out after the fact. They are definitely more expensive than the tax deduction you got, that’s one thing. The last time I slept through the night was over forty years ago, that’s another. You discover ways to worry and sources of frustration that […]

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Isaiah 35:1-10 Matthew 11:2-11 People often do like a new thing. Kim and I have recently noticed the presence of a new fast food franchise in our area, which is drawing a lot of attention: Zaxby’s. I’ve never eaten at one, although I have noticed them while traveling. Apparently, they specialize in “chicken fingerz.” I hear they are really good. Every time we have passed the new one in Cambridge we’ve seen a line of cars stretching out on the road. That’s just something humans do. When a new place opens up people have to go there and find out what it’s all about. If there is enough buzz, and if it is really good, the energy might sustain itself, and it becomes like the Rise Up drive-through on Riverside Drive. When we lived in Dayton, Ohio, food trucks were all the rage. A whole culture of food truck connoisseurs […]

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Isaiah 11:1-10 Matthew 3:1-12 I recently read a snippet from an interview with one of our most famous living Bible scholars, John Dominic Crossan. The topic of the Left Behind mania came up – you remember those books that were so popular in the nineties? They promoted the rapture concept, the notion that believers will one day, unexpectedly get scooped up into heaven, leaving behind a world on the verge of chaos. According to the theory, there follows a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil, ending with the triumphal return of Jesus to earth. This is the kind of stuff that begs to be made into a movie franchise. We touched on the concept last week, with our first Sunday of Advent texts focusing on the end of the world. Crossan had an interesting take on the rapture mania. He said he thought the obsession about Jesus’ […]

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Romans 13:11-14 Matthew 24:36-44 It’s a bit quirky that the liturgical calendar which starts today with the first Sunday of Advent, usually begins with some thoughts about the end of things. The end of time, specifically. The end of the world as we know it. There is a human desire to know in advance when that end will come. I think it must be because of some completely irrational idea that we might avoid it. If you know it’s coming maybe you can duck? But, as Jesus says, no one knows. Still, people try to figure it out, as if it were nothing more than a tough riddle. And so it seems like there is always somebody somewhere offering up a prediction about exactly when the world will end. In fact, just this fall there was a prediction that caught a lot of traction. A man from South Africa announced […]

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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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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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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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