Our theme for this summer is “things everybody believes are in the Bible, but aren’t.” And what we’re looking at today doesn’t entirely fit that theme. We just heard it in a passage from the Gospel of John. I included it not because it isn’t in the Bible, but because the way it’s often interpreted isn’t in keeping with how it’s used in the Bible.
Back when Jay Leno was the host of The Tonight Show, he used to do a segment from time to time called “Jaywalking.” He would go out onto the street outside his studio and ask random passersby questions.
Modern technology is truly amazing. Yes, it has its drawbacks; but consider this statement, which has circulated all over social media for years…“We carry in our pockets computers more powerful than the ones that helped put humans on the moon—and we mostly use it to look at cat videos.”
It was Sunday night youth group, back around 1982 or ’83. The leaders had promoted that we’d be watching a movie—and what teenager doesn’t like to see a movie?—and asked us to bring our friends. We gathered in the fellowship hall of our church, with our popcorn and pop, and the movie started.
Do you know who, according to the book of Genesis, founded the very first city ever?
It was Cain, Adam and Eve’s son—the same Cain who was the first murderer. Cain was the firstborn son of the very first people, the oldest member of the first generation who had never lived in Eden. After he killed his own brother, Abel, in a dispute over sacrifices to the LORD, he was sent out into the land of Nod—which means “Nowhere”—with a mark of God’s protection on his forehead. The first murderer built the first city, and named it after his eldest son, Enoch.
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.
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