Genesis 12:1-9 Hebrews 6:13-20 Forty years ago, when I was young and starting a family, people were worried about overpopulation. That was a big thing. China had its one child policy, which they were enforcing pretty rigidly. Only one child per family permitted, with very few exceptions. Among my friends, I would sometimes hear concern about whether or not it was responsible, even ethical, to bring a child into this world. What would life be like for them? What unknown challenges would they face in their lifetime? But while I heard people expressing these concerns, I don’t know if it actually impacted their decisions. It seemed like most of my friends were, like me, having families – two, three, even four children. And China did a total reversal of its one-child policy, when they discovered there might not be enough people to care for them when they get old. So […]

Genesis 1:1-2:4a Matthew28:16-20 Taylor Swift wrote a song called happiness. In it she says, “There will be happiness after you. There was happiness because of you. Both of these things can be true.” So, I am thinking about the sentence, “Both of these things can be true.” Because as confounding as it can be sometimes, it is so often the case in life. Two things that seem to contradict each other can both be true, at the same time. We say that God is three – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we also say that God is one. There is one God – God alone. Both these things are true. We say that Jesus is fully human, just like us. And we also say that Jesus is fully divine. Both these things are true. And in the scriptures, we read that we are made in the image of God […]

Ephesians 1:15-23 Luke 24:44-53  When we think about where God resides, we have a tendency to think “up.” Humans understand things spatially. We know where things are in relation to other things. So this kind of spatial thinking extends to our thoughts about other-worldly things too. Heaven is up in the sky. Whenever we think of God, or our loved ones in heaven, we want to look up. There is an old movie made in South Africa called The Gods Must Be Crazy. A man named Xi lives in a hunter-gatherer society, far away from the industrialized world we live in. One day an empty glass Coke bottle falls at his feet – a pilot threw it from his plane. Xi has never seen anything like this before. He assumes it is a gift from the gods, because it fell from the sky. So Xi takes it back to his village […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 – […]