Texts: Esther 4:10-14; Luke 19:5-10

Here’s a bit of Bible trivia.  What two Hebrew Bible characters are most like Esther?  Think about all those stories you’ve heard, and think about which two most resemble Esther.  Here’s a more specific version of the question: What are the other two Bible stories about the struggles and triumphs of someone who comes to power in the court of a foreign king?

Anybody want to give it a try?  ……………

Esther, and Daniel, and Joseph, make up this small sub-genre of stories: Jews who come to power in the court of a foreign king.

Over the last few decades biblical scholars have been emphasizing just how influential an event was the exile from Jerusalem to Babylon at the beginning of the 6th century BCE.  Much of the Hebrew Bible, at least in its final form, was written out of this experience of exile and empire – of being foreigners, and strangers in a strange land.  And when that’s the place where you’re standing when you’re telling and writing down your stories, it affects everything.

One way of reading the Bible is simply as the story of a people living under a succession of empires.  In this sense, the Bible is one of the few cases in which history is told by the losers rather than the winners.

In Egypt the Hebrews were slaves.  In Babylon the Jews were exiles, displaced persons.  In Persia the Jews were foreigners, generations removed from their homeland.  In all these places they were the outsiders.

But there are these three stories of people who rose to positions of power as insiders within the empire.

In Egypt the Hebrews were slaves – but there’s Joseph, son of Israel, a previous Pharaoh’s right hand man, in charge of gathering and distributing massive stores of grain during a regional…

Texts: Genesis 18:1-15; Luke 6:17-21

“The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day.”  This is a story about an appearance, a visitation.  “The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre.”  And any story that features trees in the opening line is bound to be a good one.

It’s a good story for the moment we’re in, and for Christian Education Sunday.

Ask Mark, or anyone who’s ever served on Christian Education Commission, or anyone who’s ever been a teacher of any kind, and they’ll tell you that the work of education, the work of formation, is slow.  It’s gradual.  It’s cumulative.  The formation of our minds and hearts takes place over the course of years and decades.  It’s a journey, we like to say.    We when go off to Sunday school we know this is the kind of work we’re doing.

And yet…when we look back there are certain experiences that stand out as especially formative, sometimes life changing.  Sometimes something as simple as the right phrase, spoken by the right person at the right time when we were especially ready to receive it, can be a signpost we reference the rest of our lives.  Like that time my mom said to me sometime during my childhood growing up on the farm: “Joel, your brother and sisters bring stray animals into the house, but you bring stray people.”  So the seed of being a pastor was planted early.  Thankfully, I’ve since given up on saving stray people and am much more interested in enjoying them and, in the process, becoming a little more stray myself.

There are moments, phrases, experiences that stand out as formative.  Educational.

This is a story that invites us to consider those…

Texts: Exodus 1:8-14; Romans 12:1-8

After our Twelve Hymns series, and last week’s anniversary celebration, we are finally back on the lectionary.  The lectionary provides us with a set of readings from scripture each week.  We join Protestant and Catholics in reflecting on the same readings.  We won’t stick with the lectionary every week starting now, but it’s a home base.

Romans 12 and the opening story of Exodus are two of today’s readings.  We’re bringing our own angle.  Today marks the beginning of our First Fruits pledging process, when all of us are invited to consider how we contribute financially to the mission of this congregation.  So we’re calling this Stewardship Sunday.  If the word “Stewardship” doesn’t work for you, we could call it “Jesus-talked-a-whole-lot-about-economics-and-money-and-we-should-too-so-it’s-more-about-a-way-of-life-than-a-single-Sunday Sunday.”

Romans 12:2 “Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and pleasing and whole.”

There are some passages in the Bible where you almost have to be a cultural anthropologist to understand what’s going on.  Research the setting, parse the language, scan the context for clues.  This isn’t one of those passages.  What Paul wrote to the Romans a couple thousand years ago could have been written directly to us today.

Richard Rohr has offered an updated translation for what shows up here as “world.”  He suggests plugging in the word “system” to get at what the various New Testament writers mean when they talk in this way.

So with that gloss, here’s how these words read: “Do not be conformed to the system, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and pleasing, and whole.”

From an…

Text: Ephesians 2:11-22

Last month, at the Mennonite Church USA Convention in Orlando, there was a big timeline along one side of the delegate hall.  It was kind of like the one we have for CMC in the fellowship hall this weekend, but longer – in size and time span.  It was maybe 40 feet long, give or take.  It began in the 1500’s and led up to the present.  On it, were written key events in the Anabaptist and Mennonite story.  1525, Zurich Switzerland, the first adult baptisms.  1660; publication of the Martyrs Mirror, telling the stories of Christian martyrs through the ages;  1789, the first German speaking Mennonites settle in Catherine the Great’s Russia.  And so on.  We were about to begin the Future Church Summit, and denominational leaders wanted to help us remember where we had been before looking toward where we are going.

There was lots of open space on the timeline, with differently colored markers available for anyone who wanted to add a key event.  Walking through the centuries and reading the additions was a fascinating experience of what happens when you crowd source your collective history.  Alongside the more standard highlights of immigration waves, official church statements, and the creation of institutions, were less told stories, some painful.  Like the three boarding schools Mennonites used to run that tore Native American children from their families and culture.

A few people had felt unrestricted by the chronological range of the timeline, with someone writing at the very beginning, “And on the seventh day, God rested” and someone squeezing in even before that “Big bang.”  Someone else had extended the timeline forward two years to the next national gathering in 2019, writing “Membership Guidelines abolished by delegates.”  The Membership Guidelines currently in place call for the review of…

Twelve Hymns Project: Praise God from whom

Text: Psalm 148

Psalm 148 is like one of those emails you get where the sender entered all the recipients in the To: box rather than Blind Carbon Copy.  This Psalm is the text we used for our Call to Worship this morning.  It’s an invitation to what theologian Douglas Ottati refers to as “the party of existence.”  And we are invited.  Only rather than simply getting our own invite, with all the other recipients hidden, like that lovely Blind Carbon Copy feature allows, we get the full catalogue of invites, which we scan through first before getting to our part.

The sender must have had two lists going, and begins with the first: those in “the heavens” or “the heights.”  It includes things unseen and seen: angels, hosts; sun, moon, and stars; the waters above.  The second list is “you who are on earth.”  It ranges from sea monsters to winged birds, wild beasts to domesticated animals to creeping things to fruit trees and cedars.  To make sure we get the message that we’re all invited, it names kings and peoples of the earth, young men and women, old and young.  And the invitation is not limited to carbon-based life forms.  Even the mountains and hills, fire, various forms of precipitation, even the wind gets an invite.

It’s like when the person who’s working the booth at the skating rink gets on the loud speaker and announces: “the next skate will be an all skate, and all skate.”  The lights go down, everyone gets up from their seats, the disco ball kicks into gear, and before you know it everyone and everything is on the floor, swirling around the same center of gravity, gliding to the same beat.

The party of existence is an all…