Sermons & Meditations

Romans 5:1–11
Presented February 24, 2008, by J.D. Kline
The Third Sunday in Lent

Lenten Theme: Another Way of Living

There once was a woman who owned the finest winery in all the land. Everything about the winery was superb. Its fertile land yielded some of the finest grapes to be found anywhere. The large wooden vats that nurtured the crushed grapes until maturity produced some of the world’s most exquisite wines. For more than two centuries people came from all over the world to visit the winery and sample the famous wine.

One day, though, the wine developed a bitter taste. No one could explain why, for nothing had changed. The wine was still being made exactly as it had been for two centuries. When the number of visitors and customers began to decline markedly, the woman hired consultants from around the world to ascertain the reason for the wine’s sudden bitter taste. After intense study, each expert arrived at the identical diagnosis: the vats had outlived their usefulness. They had become old and sour, and there was no way to clean and restore them. The consultants concluded that the woman’s only option was to replace the old vats.

The owner was outraged. The beautiful vats had been in her family longer than she had been alive. Family tradition demanded, she was certain, that the vats be retained. And so she tried dozens of other remedies, one desperate effort after another to improve the quality of the wine. Different fertilizers for the land, changing the acidity of the soil, new labels for the bottles, even a new overseer for the grapes—none of these produced the needed change. Still, the owner continued to put the wine into the old wine vats, and the finest grapes in the world continued to produce bitter wine.

The number of visitors and customers steadily declined, and finally the day arrived when no one came to taste or buy any wine from the once-noted winery. Eventually the vineyards fell into ruins. Faithful family members remained the only customers, convinced that family tradition was more important than satisfying wine.

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Matthew 4:1–11
Presented February 10, 2008, by J.D. Kline
The First Sunday in Lent

Lenten Theme: Another Way of Living

In the three synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness plays a critical role. It is a time of discernment, a time for Jesus to grapple with the nature and shape of his calling, to consider how it is that he might most faithfully proclaim the good news of the unfolding kingdom of God. Jesus has just been baptized in the Jordan River by John the Baptist, the Spirit descending and a voice from heaven announcing, “This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased,” when the unexpected happens. The Spirit of God leads Jesus into the wilderness for a time of testing. There is something within us that would like to believe that baptism somehow ought to provide some form of inoculation against any struggles with the darker realities of life, that baptism would render us invulnerable to the difficulties and struggles of life. But the very opposite was true for Jesus, and by our own experience, we too know that the life of faith offers no immunity from life’s hurts, struggles, and challenges. As Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, God “makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45). Truth is, when we embrace a new vision for human life—a vision of justice and peace, a vision of compassion and self-giving love—we ought not be surprised to discover that we come face to face with opposing forces who prefer the way of darkness.

Why is it that the Spirit leads Jesus into the desert? Is it not so that Jesus might confront those dark forces, that Jesus might grapple with conflicting voices from this world? Voices asserting that success and status are meant to be the ultimate goals of our life. Voices suggesting that it is in the grasping after power and the clawing after prestige that we are most able to impact the world around us. Voices that certify that the end justifies the means, that violence and injustice and warfare may well be necessary in order to achieve our results. Voices attesting that our efforts to raise our voices for justice and peace, for compassion and new life, count for little if we do not speak from a position of influence.

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Mark 12:28–31
Presented February 3, 2008, by J.D. Kline
Service Sunday

Hanging on the wall in my office is a sketch entitled “Prophets of Nonviolence,” three 20th century figures who offered powerful models of prophetic ministry, pointing the way for radical social change through nonviolent means. Each of the three embody the primary calling of a prophet, which Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann defines not simply as a matter of being an angry social critic, but much more, as “someone who, first of all, is willing to take an honest look at upsetting and unsettling realities that are denied or ignored by society at large and the powers-that-be.” Most who look at the sketch, “Prophets of Nonviolence,’ immediately recognize two of the figures—Gandhi, so instrumental in India’s independence movement, and Martin Luther King, Jr., central to the movement for peace, civil rights, and justice in this nation.

The third prophet, though lesser known, has an equally remarkable story to tell. Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, was noted for her passionate commitment to pacifism and nonviolence, to social justice and service among the poor, with a number of Catholic Worker houses in cities throughout the United States continuing to provide soup kitchens and other services for the poor. Noted peace activist Daniel Berrigan speaks of Dorothy Day in his introduction to her autobiography, The Long Loneliness. Writes Berrigan,

I am grateful beyond words for the grace of this woman’s life, for her sensible, unflinching rightness of mind, her long and lonely truth, her journey to the heart of things. I think of her as one who simply helped us, in a time of self-inflicted blindness, to see . . . . She urged our consciences off the beaten track . . . . She did this, first of all, by living as though the truth were true.

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