Think And Let Think

Matthew 21.12-17 Contrary to the witness of John Mayer, we don’t have to wait on the world to change. We can pray for it. But we shouldn’t be surprised if, while praying for the world to change, God starts the work by changing us.

Matthew 20.1-16 Grace, when it is so freely offered to any and all comers, without any regard to merit, seems downright irresponsible. Even when the truth of the matter is that grace being offered to me is no more or less miraculous that it is to someone who walks through the door at the last second. Grace is only grace because it is given to those who don’t deserve it. Which, in the end, includes each and every one of us. Envy, on the other hand, is all about keeping score, holding on to the ledger book in our minds, noticing who did what and for how long. Whereas Jesus’ story, and every other parable for that matter, is the proclamation that God has gotten out of the score-keeping business forever.

Mark 6.1-6 The rest of the world, uninformed of the story that gives meaning to our stories, considers Pride to be an essential characteristic for living. We, on the other hand, are taught to be suspicious of pride. For pride often leads to us to believe that we are better than everyone else. Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them, Jesus warns. He continues by ripping apart the religious practices of those who pray in public for public praise, and those who show off their fasting for prideful gain. All that Jesus lists falls into the category of self-justification, self! It’s like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable who does all the right things so well that he’s wrong. “Well, at least I’m not like that degenerate over there” is merely a projection of our self-inflated righteousness and a denial of our sinful truthfulness. Lent, for better and worse, is a season of accusation. It is a time for us to hear who we really are. And it begins with ashes. Ashes, of course, are a s

Revelation 21.1-6 Notice: it is not just a new heaven that John sees, but a whole new earth. Revelation, then, is the final declaration that matter matters. Remember, whenever Jesus waxes lyrical about the kingdom of heaven, he does so with earthy and earthly terms. The kingdom is like a mustard seed, it is like yeast mixed with flour, it is like a party with food and wine and dancing. Remember, when Jesus is resurrected on Easter, he returns to the displaces embodied, sharing food and drink, the incarnated Good News. Remember, when the church grows during the Acts of the Apostles, it’s not because they were pining after the pie in the sky after they die, but it grows because Christians took seriously the material world and how the sharing of goods could make life better for others. On earth as it is in heaven. Do you see? Revelation reminds us that the new heaven and the new earth isn’t just something that will happen, it is something that happens right now. We have access to how beautiful the world

Acts 2.1-4 & Romans 16.25-27 The Bible is, as Barth loved to say, the strange new world of God. With every page we discover more and more about the wild and wondrous God we worship. And in no place is this more evident than the Acts of the Apostles, and the various epistles. For, the eruption of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost sends reverberations through the church that we are still feeling today. God is on the loose!

Mark 1.1 & Mark 16.1-8 “When the church stops talking about Jesus, it has nothing left to say.” - Sam Wells

Genesis 12.1-3 & Malachi 3.1-2 The Good News of the Gospel for each and every single one of us, is that God meets us in the midst of our sins, not our successes. God meets us where we are, not where we ought to be. Israel’s story, both the person and the people, reminds us that God comes to us in our weariness and our woundedness. God delights in keeping up the covenant even when we fail to do our part. Ultimately we are as helpless as Israel, hobbling around with our hips out of joint. We can run away as far as we can for as long as we can, but one day God will catch up with us. God will grab hold of us. And God will tell us who we are...

Genesis 1.1-5 Imagine, one day, you receive a strange delivery. A trunk. It’s heavy and you can feel and hear all manner of objects inside tossing about as you drag it inside. You open it and discover a great cacophony of items. Inventories. Diaries. Poems. Creative writing assignments. Blueprints. Photographs. Letters. Various genealogical records. Drawings. And on top of it all is a note from your great-great grandfather. All it says is, “This is who I am.” The Bible is like that treasure trove of a trunk, given to us by God, in order that we might know more about the One in whom we live and move and have our being.

Luke 2.1-14 Christmas is not just about remembering an event in the distant past. Christmas is the celebration of a miracle in our midst. Christmas isn’t just where we come from, Christmas is who we are, here and now. Yes, it is finished, as Jesus says from the cross. Easter is the exclamation point on a sentence that begins long before the Incarnation of Christmas. But our knowledge of this power, our knowledge of salvation, our faith in the grace made flesh is Jesus in a miracle that has meaning for us in this very moment. As Martin Luther preacher in many of his own Christmas sermons, “The nativity of our Lord happens again and again everywhere the Gospel strikes at the heart of a person.” In other words, despite what the Grinch might realize by the end of his story, Christmas is actually about the presents, or at least the present of this present moment.

Titus 2.11 For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all.

Luke 1.67-80 The scriptures, the sermons, the songs, they are all about getting us to catch a hint of God’s more, a glimpse of the light that shines in the darkness. Dr. Seuss got it right - Maybe Christmas, the Grinch thought, doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas… perhaps… means a little bit more.

Luke 1.46-55 The incarnation is not God’s last minute hail Mary (pun intended) to fix the world. It is, was, and always will be God’s decision to dwell with us. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. God was always going to dwell with us because God always dwells with us and God will always dwell with us. And yet, Mary's song threatens those in the positions and places of power because it calls into question their power. Long before the cross stands on the horizon, Mary’s song reminds those with ears to hear that her Son’s kingdom is not of this world. Things are getting flipped upside down. Which sounds like Good News when you’re on the bottom, but bad news when you’re on the top...

Luke 1.26-38 The One born to Mary comes to embody a peaceful way of being that transcends all of what we think or know because Jesus takes us from where we are to where we can be. Mary, in receiving the visit of Gabriel and the promise he holds, goes from nobody to somebody, blessed, fortunate, given a job to do in the story of salvation. Even in her ordinariness, her youth, her singleness, perhaps her embarrassment and consternation, she is called by God anyway, singled out to bear the savior of the world into the world. This is why Mary is often referred to as the first disciple. She is the first to be called by God to take part in the good news-ing of the world. And she is the first, when called by God in this way, to say, "Let thy will be done." Notably, she prays that prayer long before her Son does. Mary has faith. Perhaps therein lies the Good News for all of us today. We don’t need the perfect holy resume, we don’t have to come from the right family, or have the right job, or the right income.

Luke 1.5-20 The season of Advent gives us permission to rest in the silliness of salvation, in the wild and wondrous ways God chooses the strangest people and the strangest means to bring about the Good News for a world filled with bad news. God will arrive in the manger, and God will come again, whether we deserve it or not. In fact, God did and will do this because we don’t deserve it - We need it. God’s got the gift, the only thing we need is the hope.

Ephesians 1.15-23 With the world moving on from the turkey to the trimming and the trappings of Christmas, today the church pauses the frenetic pace of the season and asks the question, “Who’s in charge here?”

Revelation 21.1-5 We do what we do now in anticipation of what will come; we live according to God’s future - the new heaven and the new earth. Which means that whatever heaven is, whatever the resurrection of the body is, it will be like this life, only different...

Matthew 18.21-35 The title for this sermon is "Preaching What We Practice." Which is, of course, a flipping of practicing what we preach. For, it seems as though we imagine that’s the purpose of the church - We exist to tell people like you how you’re supposed to be living. If that’s true, if that’s the point of the church, then I should end this sermon by telling you to go out into the world and forgive those who have wronged you. Which, is not a bad idea, but it’s just not the Gospel. The Gospel is not the story of what we’re supposed to do. The Gospel is the story of what God has already done...

Luke 14.15-23 There is a strange and beautiful value in looking out at the beloved community we call church and seeing the ragtag reality behind it. In the same way, there is something downright wonderful about seeing a bunch of sinners, and observing the communion of saints within and behind them. We have a word for this. A strange word. A word not often said aloud but absolutely definitive when it comes to the church - Koinonia...

The Holy Spirit is always full of surprises, full of creativity, full of force. The Spirit goes wherever she wants, unsought, maybe even unwanted, intent on making all things new. You see, that’s what Pentecost is all about. A whole new creation. Just as the Spirit hovered over the waters in Genesis bringing forth order out of chaos, the Spirit blows through the upper room upending their orderliness for something exciting and something new. It has always been the nature of the Spirit to shake up the church, particularly when the church becomes too self-satisfied and content with the status quo...

Philippians 2.5-11 Stanley Hauerwas is known for his anger. He is angry, like Jesus in the Temple, because he finds himself surrounded by Christians for whom Jesus no longer makes any difference, Christians who move and live in the world regardless of whether Jesus rose from the dead. He, that is Hauerwas, notes that his anger stems mostly from the great number of pastors who fail to challenge their churches to trust that without God, nothing is possible. In other words, if Jesus is not raised from the dead, if Jesus is not at the center of every single thing we do as a church, then we are wasting our time.