Waxing Theological

The texts for this week's sermon are Isaiah 65:17-25 and Luke 21:5-19 The End Is Near When I was in college, my friends and I spent a lot of time planning for the future.  But since we were all also very much like the characters on the television show “The Big Bang Theory,” our planning for the future probably didn’t play out the way that it does for other college students.  Rather than talking about what grad school we thought we might go to, or what summer internships we were applying for, or what our dreams were for families, career, homes, or anything else, our time was spent laying out plans for that day when all the movies we’d been watching became a reality and we found ourselves right in the middle of a full blown Zombie Apocalypse.  We had nights where we’d get together and watch George A. Romero’s zombie movies as “homework,” learning from those poor, unprepared saps on the screen what we should and should not do in the event of an outbreak of zombie co-eds on

The texts for this sermon are: 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17 and Luke 20:27-38 It’s a Trap! It seems like one of those strange and frustrating word problems they gave us when we were in school: A train leaves Vandalia traveling at 75 miles per hour and another leaves Columbia traveling at 63 miles an hour - how far does each go before they meet one another?  But of course it’s not as simple as doing a bit of math - the question the Sadducees ask is tough and doesn’t have a good answer.  But then, it’s also a trap.  The Sadducees weren’t really all that interested in Jesus’ answer - they didn’t even believe in the resurrection.  Like the talk-radio personality/news show pundit who invites an extreme member of the opposite viewpoint onto their radio show, the Sadducees were baiting Jesus by asking a ridiculous question and expecting him to give an answer that painted him as the fraud that they all saw him to be. But Jesus doesn’t miss a beat.  Just as he’s done with every

Saint or Sinner? The texts for this sermon are: Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4 and Luke 19:1-10 Today we get the chance to look at another one of those familiar passages that we think we know all about, only to discover that we really didn’t even learn the half of it when we were in Sunday School. The story goes like this - we may even remember the song: This all-too familiar “vertically challenged” person plays Tarzan for a moment just to get a glimpse of Jesus as he passes by, and instead of just getting to see Jesus walking past as he’d hoped, he instead finds himself suddenly thrust into the position of host to the very man he’d been trying to see.  Jesus looks up at the sycamore tree, sees Zacchaeus there, and quite literally invites himself to Zacchaeus’ home. It’s a simple story - it seems pretty cut and dry, easy to understand.  Jesus did what he does time and time again in Luke, picking out the sinner in the crowd and choosing to spend time with those tha