Waxing Theological

7/29/18 (Proper 12/Ordinary 17 B, Semi-Continuous) 2 Samuel 11:1-15; John 6:1-21 The Scandalous God If I’m to be honest, the Samuel text for this morning made me uncomfortable.  I wrestled with it in a lot of ways.  One of the things I appreciated about our classes in seminary was that they taught us to look for the connections between the lectionary texts, for ways to tie them together and find a common thread… but what can you really find in common with such different texts as the story of David and Bathsheba and the Feeding of the 5,000 or Jesus walking on the water?  What is there in what are, perhaps, David’s most heinous and reprehensible actions, that would even remotely be worth exploring and lifting up in a sermon at all?  There is nothing good in this account of the King of Israel, his most loyal soldier, and this woman caught in an impossible situation. Wrestling with these texts was made only more difficult, of course, by all the recen...

7-22-18 (Proper 11/Ordinary 16 Year B, Semi-Continuous) 2 Samuel 7:1-14a; Mark 6:30-34, 53-56 A Quiet Place When I was a camper, I had a counselor who led a Bible study one summer in which he introduced us to one of the most interesting pieces of music I’d ever heard.  It was a piece of experimental, avant-garde music by a composer named John Cage called 4’33.”  I’d like to just share a little 30 second snippet of this song with you so that you can get a little bit of the experience. Blog Readers: You can listen to the entire  song below! The entire song is four minutes and 33 seconds of silence - well, sort of.  John Cage would argue that last statement till his last breath.  You see, what’s amazing about the song is that it can quite literally never be played or performed the same way twice.  For John Cage, the composition was a statement on how music can be found everywhere, in everything and anyone.  At summer camp, we ...

7-15-18 (Proper 10/Ordinary 15 Year B, Semi-Continuous) 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12-23; Mark 6:14-29 Dance Like Michal is Watching In reading the passages from the lectionary this week, there are some very striking themes that run through both the Old and the New Testament readings.  Dancing plays a significant role in the events of both 2 Samuel and the gospel of Mark, but there is a deeper element of sheer boldness that shows up in the actions of both David and of John the Baptist that stands out to me and which we should take time today to focus on. In the reading today from 2 Samuel, we see king David in a fashion which is very uncustomary and, most would argue, very un becoming for a king.  David is in a peculiar position, not so much because he is dancing and leading the procession of the Ark of the Covenant back to his city, but because of the way in which he is attired.  The passage tells us that David was “girded with a linen ephod,” which was a necessar...

7-8-18 (Proper 9/Ordinary 14 B, Semi-Continuous) 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13 Sufficient Grace There’s something I’ve always found interesting about this passage in Mark - in fact, it’s always been a little bit of a hangup for me when this passage comes up in my studies and in the lectionary.  It happens right there in verse 5: “Jesus could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.”  It’s a peculiar little verse, and it’s troubling at the same time.  It’s also an account that is unique entirely to Mark’s Gospel, the Gospel that shows the most human picture of Jesus that we have in all of the New Testament.  Throughout all the rest of the Gospels, and even in Mark’s own Gospel, we see Jesus performing incredible deeds - even in the reading from last Sunday, we see Jesus healing the woman who had been hemorrhaging for 12 years and raising Jairus’ daughter from seeming death - and in the other Gosp...