Sermons & Meditations

Isaiah 43:16-21; John 7:37-38
Presented March 25th, 2007, by J.D. Kline
The Fifth Sunday in Lent

A character in the movie Notting Hill, a woman who because of an accident finds herself confined to a wheel chair, speaks words of comfort to a friend whose business must close. She says something to the effect, “The more I think about things, the more I see no rhyme or reason in life. No one knows why some things work out, and why some things don’t.” Indeed, human life is touched by random events over which you and I have little control, whether they be critical accidents, destructive tsunamis, failing businesses, serious illnesses, or intrusive death. And often, we little know why it is that some things seem to work out for us, and others do not.

Some assign responsibility for all this to a fickle God, a God who capriciously engineers difficulty, pain, and even tragedy into our lives. Others assume that God is disconnected from life, allowing events to unfold but powerless to intervene. Still others try their hardest to nail all this uncertainty down by labeling whatever happens to us, good or ill, as God’s will, God’s intention. All this raises the question, how do we make any sense out of a life that includes uncertainty and struggle, tragedy and loss, every bit as much as comfort, success, and blessing?

In the ancient days of the exile, when Jerusalem and its Temple were destroyed and many of the Israelites were forced to live in a strange and foreign land, the people experienced little else but uncertainty, tragedy and grief. It was a time of utter despair and disillusionment, as the very underpinnings of life were taken from the exiles. All that was familiar, all that had provided comfort, all that they had looked to for meaning and hope through the years—all this had vanished. In the midst of the people’s despair rises the voice of a new prophet, a Second Isaiah, who speaks words of promise. The prophet speaks not of a God who has abandoned them, but of a God who continues to create, a God who shall continue to speak and act and even intervene.

(more…)

Isaiah 55:1-9; John 4:1-30, 39-42
Presented March 11th, 2007, by Jeanne Davies
Third Sunday in Lent

As I began thinking about this morning’s texts, I realized that several of my family’s often-repeated stories had to do with the recurring theme of wasting one’s time, energy, and money: my brother’s disappointment in his Snakes Alive game, the long anticipated and disappointing climax to the journey in search of a giant man-eating clam. Fortunately, my parents had the ability to laugh at themselves and I think that these stories were so often repeated because they were important life-lessons about believing in illusions, in deceptions, either created by others or created by ourselves.

My father was a child of German immigrant parents. They moved here in the aftermath of World War I, when Germany was destitute, in desperate straights. They worked hard and then ten years later they lost everything again in the Great Depression in this country. My father knew the value of a penny; he knew how to save, to spend thriftily, and to work hard. My father was also imaginative and made good use of opportunity. One summer vacation, he had my mother and all four of us children picking up rocks on a Lake Superior beach. He had learned that rock shops would pay good money for agates. He showed all of us what an agate looked like and instructed us to pick up any we found. We spent all day picking up those rocks and at the end of the day we had buckets full. Sunburned, tired, and excited, we drove to the rock shop and waited as my dad took a handful of our precious cargo in to show the shop owners. He came back to the car and said to us, in disgust, “We have a carload of flint. It’s not worth anything.” We took those rocks back home, put them in our garden and ever after, we laughed about the time and effort we spent picking up those rocks on the beach. “Picking up agates” became a metaphor for futile effort at a task not worth one’s time, just as “Snakes Alive” and “giant man eating clam” represented misplaced enthusiasm, belief in half truths, and a delight in delusion.

(more…)

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Luke 13:31-35
Presented March 4th, 2007, by J.D. Kline
The Second Sunday in Lent

Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine, tells the story of a late evening encounter near his home in an inner-city neighborhood of Washington, D.C. While heading out to the store to pick up a few things for an upcoming trip, Wallis was preoccupied with impending responsibilities, and so did not hear running feet behind him until it was too late.

Wallis turned around, only to be hit by something sharp enough to open a gash over one of his eyes, blood running down his face. Several hands pushed him to the ground, and he heard a voice shout, “Keep him down! Get his wallet! Take his money!” Jim shares that he popped up immediately, only to discover four assailants who were children, not more than fourteen years of age. Quickly noting that the youth were not carrying weapons, Jim decided to confront them. First he scolded them. “Stop it!” he said. “Just stop it! You guys have got to quit terrorizing people like this.” Then, looking directly into their eyes, he continued, “I’m a pastor. You boys want to try to beat up on a pastor?” With that, the four assailants turned and fled down the street. But the smallest of the four turned back, looked at Jim with a sad face and said, “Pastor, ask God for a blessing for me.”

Who among us does not yearn to receive a blessing from God? It’s tempting to categorize people, to assume that some are simply beyond the reach of God, unworthy of any blessing. Sadly, there are times when we tell ourselves that we, too, do not deserve God’s blessings, as if blessing is dependent upon some sort of merit system. The continuing affirmation of the Scriptures is that ours is a God ever yearning to bless us—to strengthen and encourage us, to open new possibilities for us, even at those times when we feel overwhelmed by life’s struggles and disappointments, life’s fears and failures.

(more…)