Waxing Theological

12-24-16 (Christmas Eve Year A) Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:1-20 Real Savior - It’s a Boy ! When you think of the events that happened at Christmas Eve… what do you picture?  How do the events play out in the theatre of your mind’s eye?  Does it look like the picture on the front of a Christmas card?  Is it staged like a Cecil B. DeMille movie with incredible grandeur and production values?  Does it look more like the nativity set you have sitting on the mantlepiece?  For me, it’s definitely the nativity figures.  When I was growing up, it was that nativity that captured my imagination and shapes a lot of my early Christmas memories.  My father has a beautiful hand-carved antique nativity that he bought while he was stationed overseas in the Air Force.  The figures are exquisitely detailed and sit in a stable that is equally intricate.  The scene has real moss and hay in it, the figures are dressed in real fabrics… my father even kept a little plastic case in with the nativity fig

12-11-16 (Advent 3A) Isaiah 35:1-10; Matthew 1:18-25 Joy in the Unexpected When we were in seminary, we spent a lot of time in classes, a lot of time reading for classes, and a lot of time writing papers and doing projects for classes - but believe it or not, we actually did have some free time in the midst of having to parse Greek or Hebrew sentences and write papers exploring the hows and whys of the laws about mildew in Deuteronomy.  In that free time, we each found different ways to relax, to unwind, and to manage the stresses of our classes and classwork.  As we got to know one another, we learned about what helped each of us stay sane, and we sometimes talked about our “guilty pleasures” with one another.  You know what I mean - the things that we really enjoy that maybe not everybody else would understand, and so maybe we don’t lead off in a conversation by talking about those things?  For my friends and I, it was comic books - we’d pile into one of our cars every W

12-4-16 (Advent 2C) Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12 Strange Images of Hope There’s a state park near my hometown in western Pennsylvania called Cook Forest.  It’s the largest virgin white pine and hemlock forest east of the Rocky Mountains and was even the site for a Cecil B. DeMille film called “Unconquered.”  Our family visited the park frequently to float down the river, to buy products from different local artists, and to enjoy the beauties of the forest together. One of the stranger things that we saw in Cook Forest was a large rock left behind millennia ago by the glaciers of the Ice Age as they shifted and melted.  Now, there are a lot of these boulders and huge rocks scattered all over this area, but this one stands out in particular because it has a tree growing on top of it.  We talked to a park ranger about it once and he explained that trees will occasionally grow on top of the boulders like that almost by happenstance - a bunch of leaves fall on top of the

11-27-16 (Advent 1A) Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44 Don’t Get Left Behind! The first Sunday of Advent never fails to catch me by surprise, even after years of preaching and years before that of going to church and hearing sermons.  We go through those last few weeks of Ordinary Time in the lectionary and they tend to turn toward the apocalyptic - it’s Jesus telling the disciples what is to come, how the temple will be destroyed, all the things like that.  And then we have Christ the King Sunday, and it reminds us that the next week is Advent.  Here’s where I always get excited, too - we’ve got Thanksgiving, we get to start breaking out the Christmas decorations, we have our “hanging of the greens,” both at church and in a lot of our homes… and we’re ready .  We’re finally ready for the things that we’ve been seeing all around us since Halloween in the stores and in our communities.  We can finally listen to that Christmas music without feeling guilty - we

11-20-16 (Christ the King Sunday, Year C) Jeremiah 23:1-6; Luke 23:33-43 Christ our King We have a strange convergence of events happening today in the life of our church here in Vandalia - today is Christ the King Sunday, the Sunday where we put our utmost emphasis on Christ’s divine Lordship over all things, but we also take the time today to gather, both as this community of believers inside of these four walls, but also as a part of the Church Universal - the believers gathered in every time and every place, in order that we might welcome new members into our fellowship: Brennan and Brogan are being welcomed into the body of Christ through their baptism, and Jim and Doris are being welcomed as they transfer their membership to this church.  And to complicate matters just that much more, as you just heard the choir remind us in that beautiful medley of hymns, this Sunday is the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and so many of us are already in that “holiday spirit,” even as w

11-13-16 (Proper 28/Ordinary 31 C, Semi-Continuous) 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19 Don’t Stop Now! This week’s gospel reading invites us into yet another tricky bit of exegesis as we come full swing to the end of the lectionary year and meet head-on with Jesus’ apocalyptic teachings.  These are the passages where Jesus, perhaps himself reading the “signs of the times” and knowing that the end of his earthly ministry is coming closer and closer, shifts modes from moral-ethical teacher and parable-teller to street-corner doomsday preacher with a sandwich board hung over his neck proclaiming “The End is Near.”  They’re passages that, yet again, don’t always make us the most comfortable, and yet they’re still lifted up as important for our study, as important to the development of our faith, and as being worthwhile for hearing God’s good news for our lives. While it’s useful in the study of really any biblical passage, it’s particularly helpful to us in this instanc

11/6/16 (Proper 26/Ordinary 31 C Semi-Continuous) Haggai 1:15b-2:9; Luke 20:27-38 Seeing the Bigger Picture It seems we find ourselves facing another challenging and complex set of texts this Sunday - this time of year often begins to feel something like a “greatest hits” album of readings from what some pastors call the “table of contents books” and Jesus’ less popular teachings - you know, the ones some pastors would just as soon skip over as actually preach on.  These last few weeks leading up into Advent put a greater emphasis on looking at Jesus’ teachings on the Kingdom, as well as the words of the prophets to an Israel that has come home from exile and yet is still living under the rule of a foreign power. But as we listen to Jesus engaging in intricate theological conversations with the Sadducees, it’s easy to find ourselves standing on the outside of the conversation and trying to figure out exactly what is going on and what kind of Kingdom it is that Jesus i

10-30-16 (Reformation Sunday, Proper 26 C Semi-Continuous) Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; Luke 19:1-10 Little People, Big Things There’s an aspect of sermon preparation that is both a blessing and a curse, sometimes.  Each week, one of the most sacred, most important things that we’re supposed to do as pastors is to take the texts for the week, to delve into them and live with them for a period of time, to listen to what they have to say - both to us and to you as a congregation - and to determine how best to communicate that word from God to a particular people in a particular place and at a particular time.  We’re given this incredible opportunity to really wrestle with the texts, to dig into the various meanings and interpretations that are out there, to look at the commentaries and hear the thoughts and musings of people who have devoted their entire professional lives to the meticulous study of these gospels in every little detail, so that when they tell us that the Greek of t