Waxing Theological

2-23-14 (Epiphany 7A) Sermon Texts are: 1 Corinthians 3:10-23; Matthew 5:38-48 Turn Your Cheek and Be a Temple Many of us probably remember the news coming out of South Africa in the 1990’s - Apartheid crumbling.  Mandella freed.  It was the start of a new day for South Africans and the world had been watching with bated breath.  Many, especially those who had previously been in power in South Africa, were worried: what would this new integrated South African government look like?  What would happen in the transition now that a people who had been formerly stripped of all power were now among the ones responsible for setting a course for the future of their nation? It would have been easy for the government to completely turn the tables, for the people to begin enacting “victor’s justice” upon the ones who had been their oppressors.  In fact, history had shown that this was exactly the kind of thing that was about to happen.  They’d seen it...

I have a question for parents out there:  How do you recapture imagination to play with your children? It's the weirdest thing for me - especially for me.  But I'm realizing that I've lost a lot of my imagination.  And I find that ninety kinds of weird, because I still consider myself to have a vivid imagination.  I play Dungeons and Dragons via Skype with some of my friends back in Pittsburgh at least once a month.  I read books like Game of Thrones and get lost in the mental images that they paint for me.  I'm a hopeless geek/nerd who can tell you way  too much about obscure Star Wars characters or things from Doctor Who.  My friends in college used to call me a walking IMDB because I make a lot  of connections between actors in movies and things. But when my son brings me a wooden block and puts it up to my ear because he wants me to pretend it's a phone, I turn into the block of wood.  I say "Hello?"  I listen to the bloc...

2-16-14 (Ordinary Time 6A) Sermon Texts: Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Matthew 5:21-37 Making the Choice “You’ve heard it said… but I say…” This is the way Jesus forms the next several teachings that he gives in this “Sermon on the Mount.”  And as he lays out this groundwork for the expectations of what it means to be “more righteous than the scribes and the pharisees,” as he instructed at the end of the passage we heard last week, we can almost see him drawing a line in the sand.  He knows the so-called “righteousness” that the scribes and the pharisees practice - the very “letter of the law” to which they subscribe and the kind of living that they deemed as being “inside” the law.  He knows these things and he challenges them - it’s time for the people of God to put up or shut up, to make a choice about how they will live their lives and how they see the law of God which Jesus has just told them that he has come to fulfill. There’s no real way to get aroun...

2-2-14 (Ordinary Time 4A/5A) Sermon Text: Matthew 5:1-20 Blessed What does it mean to you when you hear the word “blessed?”  What does it mean to say that a person is blessed?  According to Webster, to be blessed means “Having a sacred nature: connected with God; very welcome, pleasant, or appreciated; held in reverence, honored in worship; of or enjoying happiness.”  We talk about “counting our blessings” time and time again; we tell people about events in our lives, describing this thing or that thing as a “blessing.”  We consider ourselves “Blessed” when something good happens to us, or when we avoid something bad.  You hit a patch of ice on the road and your car spins out of control?  We were blessed that there wasn’t anyone else on the road when i t happened.  We were blessed that we had our seat belts on.  We were blessed that the car wasn’t damaged. In the Greek the word is makarios, which is typically translated as “blesse...

1-26-14 (Ordinary Time 3A) Sermon Texts: 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23 One Radical Angle How do you picture the scene unfolding?  How does it happen that Simon Peter and his brother Andrew are swept up into discipleship, or that James and John leave the fishing to their father and decide to angle for a much different catch?  When you close your eyes and listen to the passage read, what are the images that play through your mind’s eye? As I’ve heard it read and listened to it taught throughout all of my Christian life, I’ve imagined this call happening in a very sudden and dramatic fashion.  Jesus is walking by the lakeshore.  He sees these two men at their fishing and tells them to join him.  And in a scene straight out of Forrest Gump, Simon and Andrew say “OK,” leap out of the boat, swim to shore, and follow behind Jesus.  And then we repeat the same scene with James and John.  Maybe it’s something about the way Jesus says ...

Baptism of the Lord, Year A (1-12-14) Sermon Texts: Isaiah 42:1-9; Matthew 3:13-17 Fulfilling Righteousness There’s a major question that comes up for me that I puzzle through often, especially looking at Jesus’ baptism through the lens of Matthew’s Gospel and the conversation that Jesus has with John the Baptist.  I sit and wonder: why did Jesus get baptized by John?  It’s a passage that I think is meant to raise questions - Why is this scene in the gospels, especially when John is the one who has been going around proclaiming the coming of one who is so far greater than himself that he isn’t even fit to untie his sandals?  If John baptizes people as a symbolic act of repentance from sins, what is the purpose of Jesus’ baptism, since he was sinless?  And If Jesus is this one that John is talking about who will baptize in fire and the Holy Spirit, then why does Jesus still come to John?  Shouldn’t it be the other way around, as John declares to Jes...

Epiphany - Year A  (1-5-14) Sermon Texts: Isaiah 60:1-6; Mathew 2:1-12 Epipha-What? Today we turn in the church calendar to the day of Epiphany.  We heard Luke’s tale of the manger and the shepherds at Christmas, but today we hear Matthew’s account of the visit of the “magi,” or “wise men,” or as some have read it, “kings.” It may seem a bit awkward to encounter this tale almost two weeks now after Christmas, at least in terms of the narrative we’re most familiar with - throughout our part of the country, people have already started taking down their Christmas decorations.  But Epiphany is an incredibly important day in the life of the church!  In fact, in some countries, this celebration is almost as important of the celebrations of Christmas and Easter.  In Spain, they celebrate the “Dia de los Tres Reyes” to mark the occasion.  Some families actually forgo giving presents on Christmas day to give them during Epiphany, instead.  Rather th...

Christmas Eve, Year A (12-24-13) Sermon Texts: Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:1-20 Christmas is for the Birds For each one of us, there’s usually some tradition, some marker, some specific event that makes it feel like it’s “really Christmas” - even though we’ve been listening to Bing Crosby ask us if we hear what he hears since mid-October, it just isn't Christmas for us until we have that one moment , that one tradition that assures us personally that Christmas time is here at last.  For some, it’s a certain movie, like A Christmas Story, It’s a Wonderful Life , or the Charlie Brown Christmas Special.  For others, it’s the yearly family journey to acquire the perfect family Christmas tree. For one of my oldest and closest friends, it wasn’t truly Christmas until he and his family had kept their yearly tradition of seeing Trans-Siberian Orchestra live in concert. One significant Christmas tradition that developed over the years until it became an absolute staple in ...

Advent 3A: 12-15-13 Sermon Texts: Isaiah 35:1-10; Luke 1:47-55; Mathew 11:2-11 What Were You Expecting? One of my favorite movies that plays this time of year is A Christmas Story .  There’s something about the way this movie plays out, the plight of a 9 year old at Christmas time as he desperately tries to ensure that he receives the one thing that he wants most in the world for Christmas that year, the lengths to which he goes to just survive Christmas as he battles bullies, faces department store Santas, and hits the brick wall time and time again from adults who warn him that if he gets the Red Ryder BB gun he wants, he’ll just “Shoot his eye out.”  For me, this is a movie that captures the essence of families at Christmas time - the exciting buzz of anticipation that surrounds these weeks leading up to Christmas, the moments we share in our families that turn into legends and stories that are told and retold for years to come. There's a classic ...

Advent 2A: 12-8-13 Sermon Texts: Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12 Saviors out of Stumps It’s amazing what God can do with a stump. We don’t think of them as being all that special - usually, they’re more of annoyance and eyesore than object of wonder.  They hide under tall grass and dead leaves, waiting for you to stub your toe on them or to catch your mower blade and bend it out of shape.  We pay people to come in and remove stumps from our yards, grinding them down and digging them out to remove the roots from our yards.  Or if we don’t remove them, we try to find ways to repurpose them - we put other plants on top of them, turn them into displays and tables, use them as bases for fountains and bird feeders, drill into them to put a scarecrow in the center of our gardens, and find all kinds of other ways to make something useful out of a stump. This was the state of the Israelites at the time that Isaiah wrote this prophecy.  This once mighty kin...

Advent 1A: 12-1-13 Sermon Texts: Isaiah 2:1-5; Matthew 24:36-44 Ready to Be Transformed Imagine for a moment that it’s not the first Sunday of Advent, that we’re not coming into the final legs of the harvest, and that the first frosts that promise a winter just around the corner haven’t been gracing our yards and fields.  Imagine instead that the snows have already melted, the winter has passed, and we can finally smell Spring in the air.  As we start slowly putting away the thick down coats, the snow pants and the Carhartt coveralls, we start getting out the canvass gloves, the comfortable shoes, the favorite shirt, those things that get us ready for another season of work out in the garden.  And once we’ve got our gardening “uniforms” on, we go out to the shed or the garage and grab the well-oiled, wood-grained stock of the Marlin 336 rifle hanging on the wall, take it out to the garden, and start tilling the rows to plant our cucumbers, carrots, zucchini, a...