Last week’s sermon tried to make some sense out of the parable of the Dishonest Manager that begins Luke chapter 16. That difficult story is only found in Luke. Perhaps he was the only one brave enough to tackle it, or, perhaps, it was particularly relevant in the community of faith he was addressing. The core-teaching of it was that, while there is a danger to using money and possessions to do God’s work, it is necessary to use them. It is, therefore, necessary that disciples of Jesus have as many street smarts as secular people do about the use… Continue reading →

I’d like us to try and think about how today’s scripture lessons for a few minutes this morning, so we can see how they connect to one another. I would suggest that the Old Testament Lesson in Psalm 113 furnishes us with a basic description of God as One for whom nothing is too great to accomplish and for whom no one is too small to lift up and love. Clearly God lifts up the poor and gives the undervalued a home and a significance to show that these are God’s own loved ones. Although the words are not in… Continue reading →

Today is September 11th. 9-11. The words will always have a bitter and ominous ring for those of us who value human life and peace, especially in this country. We all remember the television pictures of all the horrendous damage that was done on that day, which, to use FDR’s phrase, that shall live in infamy. We remember. What’s important, of course, is what we remember and how we remember as those who follow the Prince of Peace – which, in Hebrew, which means the sovereign of wholeness and fullness of life, not for some, but for all.

I never… Continue reading →

So, therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

Really? All of them? Is that the way it really is? In the early 1960’s a punctuation mark that was a superimposition of the question mark and the exclamation mark came to be called the “interrobang.” The mark was used for a question asked with passion. When many Christian people read Luke’s words put in Jesus’ mouth here as the climactic statement of this passage, at least the hint of the interrobang comes into things
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In reality, this saying is made… Continue reading →