Sermons & Meditations

John 20:19-31; 1 John 1:1-4
Presented April 19, 2009, by J.D. Kline
The Second Sunday of Easter/Earth Day Sunday

Flora Slosson Wuellner, ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, begins her book Prayer, Stress, and Our Inner Wounds with the observation, “As a young girl, when I first read the life of Jesus in the Gospels, I thought: If God is really like that, we are in safe hands!” Intriguing, isn’t it, that some can read the very same Gospels as did Wuellner, and see portrayed in them, not a God in whose hands we are safe, but rather an angry God, a threatening and vengeful God ever waiting to trip us up, a God who evokes a sense of fear deep within us. Perhaps because there is so much mystery in life, so much we cannot easily explain, some embrace a threatening God whom they can hold responsible for all of life’s struggles and woes. But my experience leads me to read the Gospels as does Flora Wuellner, finding there the story of a God who stands with us in our times of uncertainty and grief, a compassionate and grace-filled God who loves us with a tenacious love, a God who has formed us as God’s beloved daughters and sons.

There are times, of course, when life seems to fall in upon us, times when we simply do not know which way to turn, and it is precisely at those times when it is both difficult—yet ultimately satisfying—to trust in the goodness of our God. At such times we are invited and challenged to enter into the deepest struggles of life without being defeated by those struggles. Flora Wuellner puts it this way:

God does not send us pain. God is not a wounder or a punisher. This is important to understand as our trust in God grows. But neither does God let our wounds be wasted. The Comforter, the Holy Spirit, will not remove the lines of hard-won experience from our faces. A new power of light, the light of the divine passionate compassion, will shine through those lines on our faces.

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Isaiah 25:6-9; Mark 16:1-8
Presented April 12, 2009, by J.D. Kline
Easter Sunday

I was visiting with my dentist recently, when he began to tell me about a patient he had seen not long before who, immediately upon taking her seat, exclaimed somewhat belligerently, “I don’t want any problems today.” And yet, she followed that pronouncement by pointing out a troubled tooth in her mouth.

“That’s a problem,” said the dentist. “Your tooth is cracked.”

“I don’t want any problems,” repeated the patient. But the dentist couldn’t promise a trouble-free visit; all he could do was offer the best treatment he knew how to provide.

Faced with life’s uncertainties and fears, life’s struggles and hurts, we often find ourselves dreaming of trouble-free living. Perhaps when we hear Scriptures such as this morning’s lesson from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 25, our yearning for trouble-free living is only heightened. For the prophet anticipates a time when God will provide a feast for all manner of people, a feast of rich food and well-aged wines, a banquet feast that suggests an ever-deepening level of relationship between God and the people of God’s creation, a banquet feast that awaits a time when God “will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of God’s people” will be taken away (Isaiah 25:8). These words were spoken, not to a people whose lives were comfortable and trouble-free; quite to the contrary, they were proclaimed to a broken and despairing people living in exile in a foreign land, a people who felt as if all the underpinnings of their lives had been knocked out from under them as they were forcefully uprooted from their homeland, a people who wondered if there is any hope left in life at all.

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Mark 11:1-11; Philippians 2:5-11
Presented April 5, 2009, by J.D. Kline
Palm Sunday

It was late in the afternoon on the fourth of April, 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr. was standing alone on the balcony of the Loraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, when he called down to gospel singer Ben Branch, standing in the parking lot below, asking Branch to sing King’s favorite hymn at that evening’s scheduled rally. Just as he spoke the hymn’s title, “Precious Lord, Take my Hand,” Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot through the throat and killed.

Most of us my age and older can vividly recall the moment we first heard of the assassination of Dr. King. It quickly became one of the defining moments of the 1960s, a decade marked both by deep division and remarkable social change, by turmoil standing alongside of passionate voices crying for peace, by fear and uncertainty transformed as seeds of justice were sown. There are some intriguing parallels, it seems to me, between the untimely death of Dr. King, and the events we celebrate during Holy Week, with Jesus entering Jerusalem to the acclaim of the crowds, yet only days later finding himself arrested, tried and put to a cruel death on a cross. Martin King entered the city of Memphis, aware that there were deep risks as he offered the support of the civil rights movement to sanitation workers who were embroiled in conflict with the city. Even more, Jesus understood the incredible risk he was taking as he entered the ancient city of Jerusalem nearly 2000 years ago, proclaiming to both religious and civil authorities of the day that now is the time for thoroughgoing change. Now is the time for a new way of living and acting in the world.

In their book The Last Week Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan remind us that “Jerusalem wasn’t just any city. By the first century, it had been the center of the sacred geography of the Jewish people for a [full] millennium.” The people of Jesus’ day recalled with longing Jerusalem’s times of past glory, particularly the days of King David centuries earlier, while also looking forward to the emergence of a new day, hoping beyond hope that Jerusalem would finally—after all these centuries—be restored to its former glory. The people yearned for the coming Messiah, the “Son of David,” who would lead a movement creating the new Jerusalem. And when Jesus entered the city, the people, long chafing under Roman rule, embraced an electrifying hope that Jesus might indeed be that long-awaited Messiah.

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