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...

6-10-18 (Proper 5/Ordinary 10 B, Semi-Continuous) 1 Samuel 8:4-20, 11:14-15; Mark 3:20-35 A House Divided On the evening of June 16, 1858, Abraham Lincoln stood in front of the Illinois Hall of Representatives and delivered a speech that would ultimately end up costing him a Senate seat to Stephen A. Douglas.  In that speech, he quotes from the passage of scripture that we have heard today - “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  His speech focused on a country that was divided - a country that found itself half slave and half free - and expressed his conviction that it would not be possible for the Union to continue if the country itself continued to be divided.  He shared that he did not believe the union would dissolve, but that a decision would be made that would eventually unite the nation, one way or another, though his goal and his hope was that the nation would ultimately decide for freedom. “A house divided against itself cannot stand” -...

6-3-18 (Proper 4/Ordinary 9B, Semi-Continuous) 2 Corinthians 4:5-12; Mark 2:23-3:6 In Clay Jars This may come as no surprise to anyone in the congregation, but when I was in college, I hung out with a lot of people who were into pretty nerdy things - we regularly got into heavy discussion over various aspects of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and superheroes, and a significant number of us were into various tabletop games, from collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, to the quintessential favorite “Dungeons and Dragons.”  Among this group of friends, there were two young men in particular who I’m pretty sure knew just about as much as it was possible to know about the Dungeons and Dragons game - they had spent so much time reading the various rulebooks and source materials that, had our college offered a class in Roleplaying Games, they could probably have taught it. The thing about Dungeons and Dragons, however, is that it’s not a game that’s meant to be ...

5/27/18 (Trinity Sunday Year B) Isaiah 6:1-8; Romans 8:12-17 Find Your Calcutta “Here Am I, Send Me.”  These are the words we hear Isaiah proclaim so strongly before the throne of God as he responds to God’s question, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”  It’s a story whose theme is reflected so strongly and beautifully in the hymn, “Here I Am, Lord,” which is one of many reasons we enjoy singing it so much in our tradition for ordination services, commissioning services, and other important moments in our Christian lives.  That idea of selfless devotion to service, of willingness to be sent out, no matter what the journey may require of you, to be able to boldly and truthfully say “Here I am, Lord, send me …” it’s an admirable trait, and one we often strive to cultivate in ourselves.  And we lift up so many of those in our faith and history who have done just that - from so many figures in the Bible, including Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Dani...