sermon

Sermon of the Week:
Again & Again: The Sun Rises

An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on April 4, 2021.

Easter Sunday ~ Resurrection of the Lord

Keywords: Day of Resurrection, Mark, Empty Tomb, Sunrise, Esau McCulley. #pcusa

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
and Mark 16:1-8

There is a line, in a Psalm,
That rings through my ears
Whenever I read Mark’s Resurrection story.

Weeping may linger for the night,
But joy comes with the morning…

Typical for Mark, the details are scarce:
The scene opens with three women,
on the first day of the week
walking to the place where Jesus’ body lay.
They were preoccupied with their task, their duty,
wondering if they’d find someone to help them roll away that stone…

Mark tells us it was early, so very early,
Quote, “when the sun had risen.”

So it was dark. Then it was sunrise.

These women, focused, on their way to the tomb…
Do you think they noticed the sunrise, peeking up over the horizon?
Did they see it?

Weeping may linger for the night,
But joy comes with the morning…

///
Mark doesn’t tell us whether they noticed or not,
But they had a lot weighing them down, surely.

They’d be forgiven if they paid it no mind.
It had been quite a week.

They had important work to do, as well.
The preparation of a body for a proper burial isn’t a simple thing.
There was a process, handed down over the centuries,
An act of love for the dearly departed…
All of that would have been weighing on them,
Along with everything else from the crazy, stressful, chaotic week that just concluded.

Maybe they were paying attention
To the reality that it was not all that safe for them to be out and about
On the streets of Jerusalem
For those who were close to Jesus.
There was a crowd, demanding his death, just two days ago.
So there was that, too.
That must have been disconcerting, causing them to move cautiously, deliberately.
This wasn’t a leisurely stroll to the tomb.

And then, of course, there was the simple fact
That someone they loved, their friend, was dead.
In other words, had THEIR weeping lingered through the night
Everyone would understand.
Maybe they were weeping as they walked together that Easter morning.

///
Did they notice the sunrise?
They had a lot on their mind.
I’m guessing the sun rose without a second thought.

That would make it like most sunrises for most people.

Most people don’t notice the sunrise.
Same for me, I confess.
Whenever I’m up that early,
unless it is the most spectacular of sunrises
I rarely, if ever, pay much attention to it.

All of this prompted me to research
The mechanics of a sunrise.
It is simply astonishing, the physics of it all.

A sunrise is the result of the Earth spinning at nearly a thousand miles per hour,[i]
Travelling an orbit of 584 million miles,
Around a star that’s a million times the size of our planet…

Taking in the magnitude of all that is dizzying.
Thinking about it fills me with a sense of awe, of gratitude, of amazement.

But most of the time I barely give the rising sun a thought at all.

I’m a night person,
So I get up begrudgingly,
And if I have my way I often sleep right through the day’s sunrise.

Lately, though, I’ve been up getting up early.
We have new pups who need a morning walk.
And sometimes, sure, Brook and I make note of the rising sun
Maybe if it is extra,
purple and pink, or if the clouds fall just right…
But that’s the exception that proves the rule:
Most of the time the sunrise just happens,
Without fanfare, without any notice given,
This incredible, breathtaking moment
When night gives way to day
And tomorrow is finally here…

It usually comes and goes, unnoticed,
As I’m just doing everyday things,
Like walking my dogs, looking out for squirrels to avoid
Thinking about my to-do list and the start of my day….

Denise Anderson suggests that,
Because we’ve come to expect sunrises every day,
we’re not always impressed by them….
That doesn’t make them any less awesome, or miraculous.[ii]

And there’s significant truth to that.
The things we experience over and over again,
That we come to expect, like the sunrise,
they don’t stand out without effort.
We often don’t pay them no nevermind.

This is one reason we put such focus on remembering,
On intentionality, on doing things together
Like sharing a common meal, sharing the Lord’s supper,
which we’ll do a bit later this morning.
These practices help us name things
Important things, that we might otherwise let pass by, unawares.

And what I love about Mark,
What I love about his telling of the Easter Gospel
Is that it is so different;
it helps shake us from this tendency within us to let important things pass by,
if we can but listen, and let Mark’s Gospel shake us.

It is possible, don’t you think,
That Easter can be as familiar to us as the Sunrise.

Something that returns to us, rhythmically, like clockwork,
Year after year,
So repetitively that we barely notice a world spinning so fast
Barely notice the transition from yesterday to today,
Barely notice that everything, suddenly, is different?
Like night and day.

///
We know the Easter story, most of us do, I imagine,
And even if you’re new to the Christian faith, or checking it out again after a while,
You probably have the broad details down. [Read more…]

Sermon of the Week:
Again & Again: We Draw on Courage

An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on March 28, 2021.

Palm Sunday ~ Passion Sunday

Keywords: Palm Sunday, Lazarus, Mary’s Perfume, Nashon, Courage. #pcusa

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Isaiah 50:4-9a
and John 12:1-19

I went back to count,
And it turns out that this is my fifteenth Palm Sunday Sermon.

That feels like a lot to me.

Even though, as the months go by
We might focus on different things, you know:
The Parables of Jesus here, the letters of Paul there.
Maybe we’ll walk through parts of the Hebrew Scriptures together,
The major narrative arcs of Genesis, the story of Moses and the Exodus
The prophets Isaiah or Jeremiah…

The church calendar draws us back, from time to time, to key stories and events.

This is one of them,
The story of Jesus entering Jerusalem for the Passover festival
During that final, fateful week.

I was ordained as a pastor in 2005,
So, apparently, every year since my ordination
I’ve preached on one version or another of this story.

Now, for eight of those years I was an associate pastor
And since next Sunday is a major Sunday,
Usually the Pastor gets to preach that one.
So I got Palm Sunday,
Which is great, because I love this story.

But 15 times feels like a lot,
And sometimes I wonder, when I return to a story that many times,
If I’m going to find anything new in it.

Maybe you feel that way,
If you’ve heard a preacher preach on this story over and over again…
Is there anything new that we’re going to get?
Anything fresh and novel?

So, maybe we both wonder if this sermon is going to be any good.

But, in all honesty, every time I wonder
if I’ll find something interesting or timely
When I turn to the texts…
There’s always something there.

One of my professors in Seminary called it the fresh wind of the holy spirit
That engages us whenever we bring new questions to these ancient stories
And we look for where God is moving, what God is doing.

This year, I’m taking Denise Anderson’s suggestion
that we look at John’s version of Palm Sunday.
There are four versions of this story, one in each of the Gospels.
Not every story is like that.
Most of the time, they are just in a few of them.

But perhaps more than any other story found in each of the Gospels,
THIS story has key details that vary in each retelling.
Does Jesus come to town
on a Donkey, or is it a Colt,
Or, somehow, does he arrive on both, at the same time
(thank you, Gospel of Matthew)?
I can kind of picture Jesus trying to get both animals to behave as he worked hard to stay on top.

The answer to just what the animal situation was on Palm Sunday
depends on where you look.

And there’s more:
If you’ve been around a bit, and have heard all of these stories
You probably wondered where the negotiation about getting the donkey was.
That’s something that all the other stories mention, at length:
Tell the owner that the master needs it…
You don’t find that here, in John.
What you do find is the mention of the Palm Branches,
The reason we call this “Palm Sunday” in the first place,
But you only find that little detail here.
In the other texts, the bystanders either lay down their cloaks on the ground
Or they grab vegetation from the fields or whatever…

These little nuances are interesting,
and often we can focus on one or two of them in the sermon,
but in our mind’s eye we put them all together,
we synthesize them so that it feels like a coherent, single story,
rather than an event told by four different people,
each of whom relate relevant, important, but tangibly different information.

In all these years, I’ve never focused just on John’s version.
That was surprising to me.
I’ve turned here, to John, to do some compare and contrast, you know,
To try to get a sense of how John differs from the others,
But looking it during worship, together with you, that’s a first.

Also, again, taking Denise’s suggestion, we’ve stepped back a bit,
And considered more than just the four verses that describe Jesus’ regal entry on the Donkey.

Instead, our reading today opens a week before all of that,
At Lazarus’ house in Bethany,
Where Lazarus and Jesus, Mary and Martha are all enjoying dinner.
The disciples are there, too, apparently,
Because Judas is there, and if he is, the rest likely are as well.

Sometimes during Lent we focus just on this story,
The anointing of the feet of Jesus with costly perfume
And the controversy this anointing incites.
How ridiculous, Mary.
That was a whole POUND of pure nard!
We could have sold that and given it to the poor,
Which Jesus would have liked, you know,
Given all that he did and taught about serving the poor,
Feeding the hungry,
Giving water to the thirsty…
Three hundred denarii, Mary.
Three hundred. What we could have done with that kind of money for the poor of Bethany…

And that’s a story worthy of its own sermon or two, for sure.
With the benefit of hindsight, John tells the reader that this isn’t an honest protest,
Even if you and I might sympathize with it.

I do, actually.

I might have thought the perfuming of Jesus was too much myself.
Wasteful
Extravagant.

John tells us that it is a way for Jesus to point, once again,
to the fact that he is going to die soon,
maybe to try to get these dear friends ready for the anguish to come…
as if we could ever be prepared for death, for losing those we love.

John tells us that Judas was actually a thief,
And didn’t make this protest about the perfume in good faith….
But that doesn’t make it any less complicated a question.
There was some truth in what Judas was saying,
And Jesus’ answer reminds us that not everything is cut and dry, black and white,
That often we make choices that mean we can’t do other things,
even other good and worthy things,
and that this is one of them: honoring Jesus, at this particular moment, was worth it.
It was an act of prodigal love, overflowing love
For a Jesus who would be on a cross within a fortnight.

But what I hadn’t noticed before, in those previous sermons,
was how closely that story about the perfume falls
In John’s overarching narrative,
How it is just before Jesus’ entry at Jerusalem
on a Donkey
with palm branches
and Hosannahs
and Blessed is the One who Comes in the Name of the Lord.

And what separates these stories, John says, is a plot to kill Lazarus.

To kill Lazarus?
Why? What had HE done?

///
Well, if you step back just a little bit further,
And look at the previous chapter, John chapter 11,
There Lazarus died. [Read more…]

Sermon: Again and Again, The Sun Rises

Sermon: Again and Again, We Draw on Courage