Sermons & Meditations

John 20:1-18; Matthew 5:12
Presented April 24, 2011, by Joel Kline
Easter Sunday

During the season of Lent, in preparation for Easter, our worship services have centered on the theme, “Rejoice and Be Glad,” a study of the beatitudes of Jesus that form the introduction to the Sermon on the Mount. That Sermon, found in Matthew 5-7, is the largest single collection of Jesus’ teachings we have, teachings that form, in the words of Jesuit priest and peace activist John Dear, “the grandest manifesto of nonviolence ever written.” Psychotherapist and ordained minister Eric Kolbell reminds us in his book What Jesus Meant that the Beatitudes challenge today’s habitual expectations. “They shake up our usual criteria of normalcy by presenting a new view of reality. While sounding peaceful enough, they are at heart profound and passionate, full of insights and authority for those of us prepared, in these precarious times, to reevaluate matters at the very core of our individual and collective lives.”

In other words, the Beatitudes challenge us to take hold of a markedly new way of living—life in the realm of God. Indeed, the Beatitudes give voice to the very heart of a message God has been seeking to convey to humankind from the very beginnings of time, that a blessed life is one ever open to reevaluation and, even more, to transformation. The final beatitude, you may have noted, makes a significant shift in pronoun from they to we, a shift that gives emphasis to this call to transformed living. After asserting Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted; blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth—and each subsequent beatitude citing those who display critical qualities of faithful living, including mercy and purity of heart, peacemaking and a thirst for justice—after all this Jesus concludes: Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad… (Matthew 5:11-12).

(more…)

Matthew 26:47-56; Philippians 2:5-11
Beatitude: Blessed are the peacemakers…
Presented April 17, 2011, by Joel Kline
Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday

Donna and I have recently been watching reruns of West Wing, the television series from a decade or so ago centered on the fictional story of Josiah Bartlet as president of the United States. The first year of the series ends with an assassination attempt, and early on in the second year, the suspected sniper has just exited a bar late in the evening when he is surrounded by hovering helicopters complete with flood lights, dozens of police cars with flashing lights and sirens, and seemingly hundreds of armed officers. I thought of that scene when reading afresh today’s Gospel lesson, chronicling the story of an arrest party descending upon Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is “a large crowd with swords and clubs,” we are told—a crowd that has been sent by the chief priests and religious leaders of the day (Matthew 26:47). Though far less sophisticated than the seekers of Bartlet’s assailant, the armed crowd coming for Jesus displays a similarly excessive amount of heavy-handedness, so much so that Jesus questions them, “Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest me as though I were a bandit? Day after day I sat in the temple teaching, and you did not arrest me…” (26:55).

You will remember the larger context of the story, told in the Synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—of Jesus, after eating a Passover meal with the disciples, heading to Gethsemane for a time of prayer, convinced that his time of confrontation, his approaching death, is now all too close at hand. Only days earlier, Jesus had entered Jerusalem to the acclaim of an exuberant crowd, leaving us to wonder how things could reverse themselves so quickly. Some would suggest that it was all foreordained, that an angry God sent Jesus to die, an act that would somehow satisfy this vengeful and bloodthirsty deity. We’ve all heard the Gospel story framed just this way, but if you’re at all like me, you find such a reading of the story not only unsatisfying—but much more, an appalling distortion of the gospel Jesus proclaims. For the gospel, I am convinced, focuses not upon a God of retribution but rather a God of compassionate grace; not upon a God of hostile vengeance, but a God of remarkable forgiveness and of mercy beyond measure. Again and again the New Testament portrays Jesus as giving witness to this God who ever yearns for humanity to take hold of a new vision for life. It’s a vision of justice and of peace, a vision of life based not upon coercive domination but liberating love, not upon clenched fists but rather—in the words of Brian McLaren—“open, wounded hands extended in a welcoming embrace of kindness, gentleness, forgiveness, and grace” (Generous Orthodoxy, p. 83).

(more…)

John 11, Blessed are those who mourn…
Presented April 3, 2011, by Joel Kline
The Fourth Sunday in Lent

A familiar saying has it that there are only two sure things in life: death and taxes. Perhaps it would be well for us to add uncertainty to that list of sure things in life. By life’s very nature, should we begin to believe we have everything somehow nailed down, surely something will sooner or later come our way to remind us otherwise.

Jesus himself was no stranger to life’s uncertainty. Matthew tells us that, in the early days of Jesus’ life, his parents and he became refugees, fleeing from Bethlehem to escape King Herod, who was breathing murderous threats against Jesus. Decades later, during the course of his ministry, Jesus asserts that there are frequent times when he has no place to lay his head. And in today’s Gospel lesson from John, chapter eleven, we stand at a precarious point in Jesus’ ministry. Uncertainty prevails, as only verses earlier the Gospel writer asserts that some of the opponents of Jesus “tried to arrest Jesus again, but he escaped from their hands” (John 10:39). This is far from the only time Jesus encounters hostility and defensiveness, angry diatribes and cynical plots unleashed against him.

(more…)