Sermons

When I was little, our church had a library, with a librarian who was there on Sundays to help us find things and check books out.
These days a lot of churches are doing away with their libraries. In some cases, the church feels like its library just duplicates the work of the local public library. Libraries these days, much more so than when I was growing up, use a lot of technology, which many churches can’t really put in place, for a variety of reasons.
But I believe that, even if we give away the books in the rooms we had once set aside for that purpose, every church still has a library.

One time there was a King had three girls. He was getting very old, so he called his daughters one day and told them, says, “There’s a question I want answered and I want the truth.” Looked at the oldest, says, “How much do you love me?”

This is one of those passages in the Bible that contain the makings of several sermons.
I could talk this morning about how, in the first five verses, Jesus fulfills several of the promises he made in the long conversation he had with the disciples at the Last Supper, back in chapters 14 through 16 of John’s Gospel. Or I could talk about the change in the disciples between verse 19—where they’re hiding in fear behind locked doors—and verse 26, in which they’re in the same place but seem no longer to be afraid.

Because the Sabbath, and not just any Sabbath but the Sabbath of Passover, was coming, the Jewish authorities wanted the bodies down off the crosses as quickly as possible. But crucifixion is a slow and agonizing death, taking at least hours, and sometimes days.

In the Synoptic Gospels, the event that finally led the religious leaders to collaborate with Rome and have Jesus killed was the cleansing of the temple. But in John, that happens very early in the story. Instead, the last straw is Jesus’ raising of Lazarus.

I am certain that contemporaries of Jesus during his time on earth would consider modern medicine nothing short of miraculous.
Folks in those days got sick and died from conditions we can easily cure with a course of antibiotics. We can take a person with cancer and, through surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, bring them back to health. Without modern orthopedics, a great many of us would be living in constant pain that might eventually leave us unable to walk.

Once upon a time, I led a group studying the book of Job. It turned out that, the more we dug into the book, the less we enjoyed it. It’s not like the Psalms, where you study one, finish it, and turn to another one. Job is essentially a long argument between the main character and three of his friends, with appearances later from a fourth friend and, at the very end, from God.

The people who study such things tell us that most people they’ve asked have said they want sermons that offer concrete ways we can apply a particular message to our lives. So, in the interest of giving the people what they want, I offer this:

I was part of an e-mail listserv years ago with a bunch of pastors all over the world. The group on the listserv discussed the weekly lectionary texts, under the direction of a pastor from the United Church of Canada.

If you have a mouse in a maze with a reward at the end, and you make it so the mouse receives a shock or some other undesirable stimulus whenever they reach for that reward, the mouse will stop reaching for it. And if, later, the shock is removed, the mouse still won’t reach for the reward.

In this text, we’re back in Cana.
Most scholars see the first twelve books of the Fourth Gospel as the “Book of Signs,” in which Jesus does things that cause others to know who he is and believe in him. And within that “Book of Signs,” according to some scholars, there is a discrete section from the beginning of chapter 2 through the end of chapter 4, bookended by the first and second of the seven signs taking place at Cana.

My folks used to watch those People’s Court-style judge shows every afternoon. You know what I’m talking about; I think Judge Wapner on The People’s Court was the first one, but he certainly wasn’t the last. A lot of the cases that are dealt with on those shows are pretty minor in the scheme of things, but they’ve managed to break friendships, sometimes even sparked family feuds, when someone has damaged property or taken something that another person thinks belongs to them, or whatever.