A long, long time ago, a prophet named Jeremiah preached a sermon, a summary of which is found in Jeremiah 7:1-15 that most scholars call the Temple Sermon. There is also a shorter summary of this same sermon in Jeremiah 26 that tells us that Jeremiah preached this sermon in the Temple at or near the coronation of King Jehoiakim in Judah in the year 609 BCE. A mere dozen years before this there had begun a great religious revival in Judah that eventuated in the removal of local places of worship in the land, leaving the Jerusalem Temple as… Continue reading →

“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” Those are words penned by poet W.B. Yeats following WWI when he saw society, as he knew it, falling apart. Change was just coming too fast. Nothing could hold together. It is a common sentiment today, too, I think. I hear people say they are afraid to turn on the news in the morning because they never know what may have happened overnight. It has been a particularly bad season with devastating hurricanes and tornadoes, wildfires and other so-called natural disasters. And in addition there is the anger and conflict all around. There… Continue reading →

The musical “Fiddler on the Roof” is set in the little Jewish village (the Yiddish word would be shtetl) of Anatevka in Russia.. The Russian powers (that were Christian by name at least) had co-existed with the Jewish folk for a long time, but now, a cold wind blew from the Czar that dictated that Jews were no longer welcome as they had been, and Anatevka was to be purged of its inhabitants. They all had be leave or face violence. One of my favourite lines is spoken, at almost the end of the play, by the old rabbi (or… Continue reading →

Last Wednesday was All Saints Day and today is All Saints Sunday. In the Bible (either Testament) being a saint is being “holy.” To be holy means “set apart to God’s values and service in the real world. These last words are crucial. God’s “saints” are in touch with the realities of life in the real world. The Bible is clear that God made the world (now “how,” but “that”), and, according to John 3:16, God loves the world. God puts saints in the world to be a blessing for the world as an active demonstration of that love. The… Continue reading →