Sermons

Pastor Joe McTaggart answered the knock on his study door with a weary sigh.
Things had gotten so bad in his church, the First Christian Church of Corbin City, Kansas, that or the first time in his life he was seriously thinking about leaving the ministry, retiring, moving to a quiet lake somewhere to finish out his days fishing and writing. It wasn’t that he didn’t love the people there—he’d spent the last decade living and working among them, sharing their joys and sorrows, watching their children grow up, helping them raise up new leaders.

I was in my first or second year of college when ,just before Easter, I became aware that there are New Testament scholars who believe Jesus was not actually raised from the dead.  I didn’t know any of the details, and didn’t know the names of any of those scholars, but I’d heard this little snippet of information as I went about my everyday business.

This might be a very appropriate confession to make on Cinco de Mayo, when we’re about to go downstairs for a fellowship dinner celebrating the occasion: I love tacos. Absolutely love them. Carne asada, carnitas, al pastor, tinga, birria, you name it, I love them. I love the ground beef ones like you get at Taco Bell, too. Apart from any that might be made from tongue or some kind of guts, I love tacos.

It seems like just about every church has a personality. In some churches everyone dresses very formally, and in others people are quite casual—even to the point, now and then, of elders getting up to pray at the communion table in shorts. In some churches all ideas are supposed to come from the pastor, and in others most of the best ones come from members of the congregation.

Most kids go through various phases as they grow up. Some of these have to do with food: they will only eat, for instance, macaroni and cheese, every meal, every day, for weeks on end. Or maybe they’re about clothing: when my nephew was really little, he wanted to wear a Power Rangers costume every day. Eventually he outgrew the costume, and my sister thought that would be the end of it; but a friend of hers had the same costume in a bigger size.

When Mike and I lived in Oregon, even though we had a car, we liked to get up sometimes of a Saturday morning and go on a bus adventure. Mike generally rode the bus to work in those days, so he bought a monthly pass that allowed him to ride any bus or train to anywhere in the Portland metro area. At the time it cost him under $50 each month—substantially less than the upkeep of another vehicle. And I would buy a day pass that allowed me to do the same thing, just for the day.

The first human being walked on the moon three days after my first birthday. My dad says I watched it on TV, but I don’t remember it.
The three astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission carried cameras with them, and they took a number of photos that have become iconic. One of the most haunting was taken by Michael Collins, as he orbited the moon in the command module Columbia while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon’s surface in the lunar module, the Eagle. The picture has been called “Every human being except Michael Collins.” It shows the lunar lander on its way to the moon, with Earth rising in the distant background.

I’m not a real big sports fan—other than college basketball, baseball, hockey…and curling. Most of those I am happy to watch on TV, but not hockey.
It’s just not possible for the camera to be in the right place when the fight starts. And there’s always a fight. I think they’ve done a bit to reduce that over the years, and fighters do have to do their time in the penalty box, but hockey is an intense game and there is at the very least a good amount of aggressive shoving of opposing players into the walls of the rink.

One of my seminary professors used to introduce lessons from time to time by imagining phone conversations between movie studio execs and Cecil B. DeMille as he worked on his epic films about the Bible.

Two years ago, when Russia first invaded Ukraine, and Putin was throwing ominous threats to anybody who dared stop him, somebody posted a message on Twitter for younger folks who were listening to him and scared. The message said, “Go find your nearest GenXer and hold on for dear life.”

March 10, 2024 (4th Sunday in Lent) “The Greatest Commandment” Mark 12:28-44

“What do you want me to do for you?”
The question, with a very slight variation in wording, appears twice in our reading today. Once it’s addressed to James and John, who ask for something that demonstrates how very blind they are to who Jesus is and what he came to do. He has just finished saying, for the third time, that when they get to Jerusalem, things are going to get really scary and really bad, and Jesus would be arrested and crucified—but then on the third day he would rise again. And their immediate response was to ask to sit on his right hand and his left, when he is in his glory and sitting on his eternal throne.