A couple of Easter photos from church this morning

The God of Life & the Fear of Death

There’s a blog I like to follow that perhaps you’ve heard of. It’s called Humans of New York, and the idea behind it is very simple. The photographer (Brandon Stanton) just takes pictures of people on the street, and then, using their own words, tells a little bit about them. It might be just an autobiographical sentence or two, or it may be an entire paragraph about a recent experience they’ve had.

The entry I’m thinking of today featured a young man holding his forehead with the spread fingers of his right hand. This is what he said:

My friend convinced me to go to church last weekend for the first time in five years. At the end of the service, the pastor told everyone to line up at the altar for a one-on-one prayer. I was the fifth in line. Everyone else got short prayers. Just a few seconds and they were done. But the pastor looked at me with a weird face. He announced that he had a vision of me getting locked up. Then he had the whole church form a circle, and he put his hand on my face like this, and he started shaking my head for fifteen minutes. He said he was trying to cancel my destiny. My friend was laughing and filming the whole thing. I’ve got to admit though—it’s got me nervous. I’m going back this week to see if I can get some more details.[1]

Maundy Thursday Evening

Our Lord has been betrayed unto death; our altar has been stripped

The First Full Moon of Spring

That means this Sunday is Easter

My Holy Week Flowers

The yellow carnation is the official flower of my church and the tulip is the unofficial flower of the Reformed faith

A Pulitzer Prize Winning Communist!

Palm Sunday Sermon

Introduction: The Crowd & the Entrance

It’s easy to get the Palm Sunday story wrong. So easy, in fact, that we almost always do just that. There are two important points that we usually miss. And when I say “we” I actually mean “I”.

The first one has to do with the crowd. The fact that the crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem on Sunday was the same crowd that demanded his execution on Friday is a sermon that preaches itself. It speaks of the fickleness of human nature, of betrayal and denial and our need to be like others.

Of course all these are present in the story of Jesus. But it’s not really found in the mob of people that didn’t really know him, but in and among the twelve who knew him best. That’s because the crowd that celebrated him on Palm Sunday was not necessarily the same crowd that condemned him on Good Friday. All four gospels[1] seem to agree that it wasn’t the inhabitants of Jerusalem who welcomed Jesus on the first day of the week, but his fellow pilgrims. In other words, it was probably Galileans who waved branches and laid their cloaks on the road to make way for the coming of the king, triumphant and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey.[2] This is clearest in Luke, who specifically refers to the welcoming crowd as “the whole multitude of his disciples.”[3] Since those who demanded his crucifixion a few days later were probably either mostly or even wholly the inhabitants of the city, the contrast between the two groups is undeniable.

My Small Dog Brewster Meese Has Discovered a New Method of Sofa Arm Utilization

Homemade Latte

The only electricity used is the stove.

This Week's Flowers

The closest things to orange I could find for St. Patrick's day were these tulips.

On Being Found

Introduction: The Road Goes Ever On

“It’s a dangerous business… going out of your door…. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”* This is something Bilbo Baggins, Hobbit of the Shire, used to say to his nephew Frodo, and it’s no less true in our world than it was in Middle Earth. This is a great metaphor for travel, or for life, or for embarking on a new relationship or career. But it’s an even better metaphor for writing a sermon.

There’s an aspect of this J.R.R. Tolkien quote in just about anything I do, which is one of the reasons I am attracted to Christianity in the first place. There’s no way for me to separate the idea of a journey from the way I look at discipleship, that is, following Christ. And I like to take things as they come, not decide in advance what value I’ll be getting from an experience.

But sermon writing takes this “journey” idea to a whole new level. Anytime I embark on the writing of a sermon, it’s like climbing into my car in San Diego with the intention of driving to Denver. Sometimes I have a roadmap, sometimes I don’t. But no matter what my intentions might be or what resources I might have, I almost always end up taking a few side trips along the way. Sometimes I head in the direction of Denver, don’t make it beyond Vegas. Or sometimes I get thrown immediately off-course from the start, and find myself in Baja. But no matter where I end up going, through prayer and research and meditation, I see some pretty interesting sights (at least they’re interesting to me). In this way, preaching is like showing you a slide show from my last vacation.

Rock Bottom

AN INVITATION TO THE TABLE

PART I: The One Who Went Away

There’s one thing about hitting rock bottom: You can’t go any farther in that direction. You can either just stay there and die. Or you can turn around and start digging your way back up. And so when this wayward and wasteful boy went as low as he could go, he came to his senses, admitted his faults, and began the journey home.

We already know the rest of the story, I hope. He was willing to tell his father how wrong he’d been, and that he was willing to live as his father’s servant. But before he could even finish his speech, he suddenly found himself not a servant, but once again his father’s son. In fact, it appears that, in his father’s eyes, he never stopped being his son.

To celebrate his return, his father bestowed upon him every gift he could imagine. He deserved none of it, but he received all of it. And so the Parable of the Prodigal Son is one of the Bible’s most eloquent definitions of grace: A relationship we never earned, a love we spurned, and forgiveness that is ours before we can even finish saying we’re sorry.