Matthew 9:18-26 We are seeing a lot of remembrances right now from one year ago. As a nation, we are remembering together how this pandemic began a year ago. Remembering what we were doing last year at this time. March 15 of last year was the last time we gathered in the sanctuary for worship. We knew then something big, something ominous was coming. Many of us had decided already to stay home. And for those of us who were here, we were introduced to new practices – social distancing. Hand sanitizing. No touching. No touching. This felt very strange. We knew something big was on the horizon, but we had no real understanding of what it would be. I listened to the news, I watched what was going on around me. And it seemed like every time I said to myself, “that can’t happen,” it did happen. It just […]
Continue readingAuthor: Maggie Gillespie
Stories
Matthew 9:27-33 I have been wondering recently what we will say about our pandemic experience after it is all over. When we look back on this time, with the perspective of months or years, what will we say? What stories will we tell? I listen sometimes to Richard Rohr, a Franciscan Friar, who writes and speaks a lot about spiritual things. I heard him say that there was surprisingly little written about the great flu pandemic of 1918. The reason, he gathered, was because people were ashamed of themselves. Some people abandoned their families. Many people acted in selfishness and fear. And after it was all over, they were too ashamed to speak of it. They only wanted to forget about it. If we are honest with ourselves, each one of us can probably identify with that in some way. There have been times in our lives that we were […]
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Matthew 8:5-13 Last weekend Kim and I took our dog, Chuy, to Ocean City to walk on the beach. We like going there now and then throughout the winter months. On that day it was pretty cold and windy, so there were very few people there. We let Chuy off the leash to give him the rare joy of running free while we walked near the shore. I am always torn between wanting to look out at the beautiful vista of beach and sky and sea and wanting to keep my eyes to the ground lest I miss some treasure. Shells, bits of coral, sea glass. Sometimes, not often, I find some perfect little shell. But more often I find some broken, imperfect thing that is extraordinary in its own way, and I pick it up. I think perhaps the most wonderful treasures I have are the imperfect things, because […]
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Matthew 8:1-4,16-17 A lot of the time you can keep your health issues to yourself. You don’t have to announce them to the world if you don’t want to. You can have as much privacy as you like. But it’s different with infectious diseases. And in a time of pandemic, it’s very different. People are hyper-alert to any signs of illness in themselves or the people around them. I know. Whenever I sneeze into my mask, I can feel people giving me the side eye and inching away. It was like this, but worse, in the ancient world with leprosy. Anyone who had leprosy was shunned. Leprosy was serious business. It meant potentially disfigurement, rotting skin, and loss of limbs; something highly contagious and incurable. People believed that merely touching a leper could cause you to become infected. And so the lepers in Biblical times were banned from community life. […]
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Isaiah 40:21-31 ; Mark 1:29-39 There are many stories of creation, coming from a variety of different cultural and religious traditions. We know best the two creation stories in Genesis. And we know them in a different way than we might know others, outside our religious tradition. But they are stories, like the others. And the reason we need such stories is simply because a story can contain greater, deeper truth sometimes than a whole pile of factual statements. There’s the old saying, a picture paints a thousand words. I think of stories as word pictures. They use words imaginatively to paint pictures that help us understand who we are and where we came from, and why we are here. The two stories in Genesis about how the world came into being, the story in chapter one, about the seven days of creation, and the story in chapter 2, about Adam […]
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1 Corinthians 8:1-13 Back when I was just beginning to explore my call to ministry, I was a member of a church in Pennsylvania. I had just made my decision to attend seminary and pursue a Master of Divinity degree. I was at a presbytery meeting one day standing around with a few pastors who were offering me their personal advice about seminary. One of these men said, “You’ll be fine as long as you keep your eyes and ears shut.” That struck me as counterproductive, but I got his meaning. His idea was the knowledge they want to give you in seminary will not help your faith, but hurt it. For him, such knowledge is a threat to the gospel. It’s possible that there were some seminary professors who looked down on him, back when he was in school. Maybe he pushed back on some of their new ideas […]
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Jonah 3:1-5, 10 Mark1:14-20 Last week I spoke to you about how you know when God is calling you. The short answer is you just know. Last week we heard from the story of Samuel, the young boy who served in the temple under the priest Eli, and heard God calling his name one night. And we heard, from John’s gospel, the story of the call of Nathanael – the one to whom Jesus said, I saw you under the fig tree. The call stories in the Bible help us to know that there isn’t a formula, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all call. So today, two more call stories. We hear a little snippet from the story of Jonah. The Lord has called Jonah to go to Nineveh and proclaim a message: Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown. It is a call to repent from their sinful ways. And the […]
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1 Samuel 3:1-10; John 1:43-51 “The word of the Lord was rare in those days.” This is the setting in which the young boy Samuel first heard the call of God to him. It was the period of time before there were kings in Israel, a time when Israel was ruled by judges, and if you have read the book of Judges then you know it was not a high point in Israel’s history. As the closing words in that book says, “all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” The word of the Lord was rare in those days. It was not one of the good times. The boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord in the temple under the authority of Eli, and Samuel was there for a reason. Before he was conceived, his mother Hannah was childless. She was married to Elkanah, who loved […]
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Mark 1:4-11 I always love this Sunday. The baptism of the Lord. It always comes the Sunday following Epiphany. It’s the one day of the year that we intentionally remember that Jesus was baptized by John, and that we are also called to be baptized into his family. For me, it’s always a treasured opportunity to talk with you about why we baptize, what it means to us. It’s easy to forget about baptism, really. Every new Christian is meant to be baptized, but we do it so infrequently that we seldom think of it. We all get baptized, but only once. And if you were baptized as an infant, as most of us were, you don’t even have any memory of it. Some people don’t even know for sure if they were baptized. Which is interesting to me. It says to me that baptism is sometimes a rather meaningless […]
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Matthew 2:1-12 Much of the time the stories from scripture live in our imaginations somewhat differently than they live on the pages of the Bible. This morning we sing an old familiar song, “We three kings of orient are, bearing gifts we travers afar.” And yet the scripture says nothing about them being kings. And, whatever we call them – kings, magi, wise men – the scripture never mentions how many of them there were. We only infer that from the number of gifts that were mentioned. Nonetheless, every nativity scene has three men bearing gifts, often wearing crowns. Because they’re kings. Only, they’re not. We’re really not sure what they are – except we know they are foreign. These guys are out-of-towners, and I think that helps to explain why they act as dumb as they do. They go to the king – Herod – to ask him for […]
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