If you spent some time thumbing through the Chalice Hymnal, you’ll find one topic missing: there aren’t any of the good old gospel hymns about Jesus’ blood.
Personally this doesn’t bother me most of the time. Those hymns are actually fun to sing; the tunes are rousing and upbeat, and in this part of the world a lot of us grew up immersed in that kind of theology, so we sing with great gusto.
Some years ago, The Christian Century reported on a study some anthropologists or someone had done. What they discovered was that nearly all human beings are musical. Something like 95 percent of people are capable of making music of some kind. That means that out of every 100 people, only five are completely hopeless when it comes to music.
It seems like when you get ready to move to a new community, there’s one thing you don’t really know, maybe even can’t know, until you get there and actually start living your life: What’s the water like?
Before I start, it’s probably good to deal with a few minor things, so we all get on the bus together, as Fred Craddock sometimes said.
First, and probably least important, the name of the book is Revelation, not Revelations. Specifically, it’s The Revelation to John, although we don’t typically call it that.
Today’s story is, I suspect, among the Easter stories second in popularity only to the one in John 20, in which Mary Magdalene encounters the risen Christ in the garden outside his tomb. The reason may well be because we can all identify with it—even though none of us was there when they crucified our Lord, even though none of us was in that upper room when the women came rushing back from the tomb to tell the disciples the tomb was empty and angels had said Jesus was alive.
In Jewish biblical interpretation, students engage in a practice called Midrash, in which they discuss details that are left out of a text, or questions that the text raises but never quite addresses. This could be things like, “How did Sarah react when Abraham took Isaac up to Mt. Moriah to sacrifice him, apparently because God commanded it?” Or, “Why did Lot’s wife turn around to see the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and why did she turn to a pillar of salt?”
Did you know that the first ticker-tape parade was held in New York City in 1886, during the celebration of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty?
It was apparently a spontaneous thing that time, but it quickly became a tradition. As the parade wound through the financial district, so the New York Times reported, office boys began to unwind spools of ticker tape out the windows over the procession, until the older, dignified and respectable businessmen pushed them out of the way so they could get in on the fun.
When I planned out my sermon topics for April, I noted that today’s reading is about “two healings.” The first one is obvious: as he goes into Jerusalem, Jesus encounters a blind beggar and restores his sight to him. This passage is pretty clearly borrowed from Mark, but Luke makes a couple changes to it.
This parable is truly fascinating to me. It might not be as beloved as last week’s three parables, especially the final one about the father whose lost son returns. But it’s fascinating, because the more you look at it, the more levels it seems to be working on.
Have you ever lost something really important?
I don’t mean when you pull your clothes out of the dryer and find that you’ve lost one of a pair of socks, or when you’re digging around looking for a lid to match the plastic container you’ve put leftovers in, and there just isn’t one. Where did it go? It’s not like it grew legs and walked away…but it sure isn’t where it’s supposed to be.
No, I mean something really important.
A certain girls’ softball coach, whose name I don’t know, was facing a difficult decision as he warmed the team up for their last practice before their final roster was announced. Brenda came to practice and tried hard, but she couldn’t quite get the knack of hitting the ball, and missed most of the fly balls that came her way out there in right field.[1] The coach planned to cut Brenda, until his daughter, who was also on the team, pulled him aside.
When we read books that were written in different eras, we oftentimes run into language or concepts that we are not fans of in this day and age. We might go back to Shakespeare and read The Taming of the Shrew, and before we even open the book, we object to the title. Years ago, and sometimes even today, we hear a woman being described as “shrewish.”. And sometimes, that woman truly has an unpleasant personality; but oftentimes she is simply someone who speaks her mind, or asks for what she wants, or is simply assertive in ways that are admired in men but not in women.
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