Waxing Theological

5-31-15 (Trinity Sunday, Year B) Isaiah 6:1-8; John 3:1-17 Redeemed, Called, and Fed     Two men encounter God.  Two men are called.  Two men receive incredible words directly from the mouth of God.  Two men express their hesitations and doubts in the face of their encounter with God.  And yet the results of their two experiences couldn’t be any more different.     Isaiah’s encounter with God happens in a dream-like vision: he is transported to God’s throne room.  He sees the seraphim, those angelic beings that have filled our hymns and art but  are only ever shown in this particular passage of Isaiah, surrounding the throne in worship so powerful that the door frames are shaking and the room is filling with smoke.  And it quite literally puts the fear of God into him.  He’s so scared at the fact that he is seeing what angels themselves cover their faces from that he throws himself down to the ground.     For Nicodemus, the experience is a little more subdued, to say the least. 

5-24-15 (Pentecost B) Acts 2:1-21; John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15 Taking Time to Remember     This weekend, and especially tomorrow, it’s important for us to take time to remember and to give thanks.  We’ll take Memorial Day together to step back, to spend time with family, and to be thankful for the men and women who have given their lives in the service of this country, who have enabled us to take days like this and to celebrate them together freely and without fear.     But as you can tell by the red throughout the sanctuary today, it’s also Pentecost - it’s the  day in the year of the church when we celebrate what could be called the church’s “birthday,” the day when the Spirit was poured out to the disciples and to the entire world.  I faced a quandary of sorts this week as I prepared my sermon and looked at today’s familiar texts.  Pentecost and Memorial Day don’t intersect all that often, and they’re both such important days that you want to at least recognize both, even when we kn

5-17-15 (Easter 7B) 1 John 5:9-13; John 17:6-19 What's In Your Bible?     We’re doing something a little different today, and I’m going to be looking for audience participation on this one.  It’s time to play a little game together - I call it “What’s in your Bible?”  I’ve gathered together some quotes, and it’s your jobs to determine whether they’re actually from the Bible or not.  Some of them are really easy, while others might surprise you.  Here we go:  Let’s start off with an easy one:  “Honor thy father and mother.”  Everybody got that one?  It’s commandment number five in Exodus 20:12  Good!  Now - how about “If God is for us, who can be against us?”  That one comes from Paul in Romans 8:31, among other places.  Going strong - let’s keep it up!  How about: “A penny saved is a penny earned?”  Not in the Bible, correct.  Now let’s up the challenge a little bit.  What about the proverb, “God helps those who help themselves?”  While it's been quoted as if it were biblic

5-10-15 (Easter 6B) 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17 Greater Love     Jesus’ words in this passage are among the more compelling teachings that we hear in the Gospels: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” - we especially hear them around Memorial Day as we remember those men and women who laid down their lives, not just for friends, but for people whom they’d never know.  But as noble as those words are, and even as appropriate as they can be to remember our fallen, Jesus tells his disciples this in something of a different context, and for a different purpose as he continues in this “final discourse” from John’s Gospel.     Perhaps the strangest thing about it all isn’t even the fact that Jesus talks about laying down his life for his friends; it’s the fact that Jesus calls the disciples his friends in the first place.  Throughout other parts of the Gospel, Jesus addresses the disciples as being like servants - he tells them that they mu

5-3-15 (Easter 5B) 1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8 The Fruits of Love     As we continue to move through John’s letter and Jesus’ teachings from John’s Gospel in his farewell discourse to the disciples, we’re also being led through a real clinic on love - we’ve explored love in a variety of aspects: how God’s love for us has taken shape, how we can come to understand God’s love for us and to internalize it, and what it looks like for us to put that love into practice, to make that love as much a part of our lives as our own hands and feet.     One of John’s favorite words, both in the Gospel readings and in the letter, is “abide.”  We hear it a lot in this week’s readings: Jesus tells the disciples to abide in him as he abides in them.  John writes that we know that we live in love because God abides in us through the power of the Spirit, and then gives further encouragement several times to abide in God, to let God abide in us, and to be confident that both are possible.     As many t