Texts:: Isaiah 50:4-9a; Matthew 26:14-25

If you were to randomly walk into our house anytime in the last four or five months, odds are pretty good you’d hear a certain Broadway musical playing at high volume.  A little before Christmas, Hamilton took our household by storm.  It’s still a favorite, although not quite as intense now as it was for a while.  It’s been such a constant at our house it’s nearly miraculous this is the first time it’s come up in a sermon.

For the uninitiated, Hamilton is the true story of Alexander Hamilton, an orphan who became a Revolutionary War leader and the first US Treasury Secretary ; George Washington’s right hand man.  And it’s all set to hip hop.  As the opening number says, he was

“The ten dollar founding father without a father

got a lot farther

by working a lot harder

by being a lot smarter

by being a self starter.”

Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant to New York from the Caribbean and is played by the musical’s writer, Lin Manuel Miranda, himself the son of a Puerto Rican immigrant to New York.  In the original cast, George Washington is black, and Thomas Jefferson has dreads.  Along with being lyrically brilliant, thoroughly educational, and impossibly catchy, another reason for its popularity in our house is that the female leads are the Schuyler sisters, Angelica, Eliza, who marries Alexander, and Peggy.  Three sisters.  The Miller sisters quickly adopted and perfected their part.

Another feature is that the story is largely told through the eyes of Aaron Burr.  Burr and Hamilton shared much in common, but had very different ways of pursuing their aspirations.  In case we had forgotten or slept through high school US history, Burr tells us right away that he’s the fool who shot and killed Hamilton, in a dual.  So…

Text: John 11:1-45 (Ezekiel 37:1-14)

(The sermon began with an abridged dramatic retelling of the short story, “The Fix,” by Percival Everett.  Listen to the audio above or read the full text at the link HERE.)

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This is how Percival Everett’s short story titled “The Fix” ends, with a literal cliffhanger.  It is a story I first heard over 5 years ago, but it is one that has always stuck with me because, as any good short story does, it raises provocative questions without giving easy answers. 

And I couldn’t help but come back to it this last week as I studied the scripture passage from the lectionary for today.  Mary and Martha are hardly an angry mob with torches and pitchforks, but their incessant pleading with Jesus and their slightly passive aggressive insistence that he could have done something couldn’t help but make me think of this story.  It’s dangerous to try to start drawing too many direct parallels between the two stories, but as I reflect on both of them, I wonder if we don’t start to miss something if we think that Jesus just came to be our fix-it man. 

Fixing things is complicated business. 

But I think that so often this is how we treat our faith, how we think about what it means to believe in Jesus, even if we wouldn’t admit it outright.  Surely Jesus will fix the broken things in our lives whether it’s our radios or our relationships.  Maybe with a piece of gum or a little mud, Jesus will put things right in a jiffy.  Maybe if we pray hard enough, or get enough likes on that Facebook post Jesus will move us to the front of the line and get to work on whatever it is that we need fixed. 

But fixing things is complicated business.

And…

Text: John 9:1-41

Every morning I have a familiar routine.  One of the very first things I do after getting out of bed is walk to the countertop in the bathroom.  I find this case, unscrew the lids, and put a round piece of plastic in each eye.  Before I do this, the world is really blurry.  I am badly nearsighted.  I started wearing glasses in the 3rd grade and went to contacts sometime in middle school.  If the numbers mean anything to you, my contact lens prescription is in the -7’s.  This amounts to me being significantly handicapped when I don’t have my contacts in.  I trip over stuff on the floor.  I wouldn’t even think of driving.

If I didn’t have my contacts in right now, this would be a very different experience, mostly for me, but also for you.  I’d have to hold my notes close to my face to read them…or get better at memorizing sermons.  Looking across the congregation would be more for effect than actually seeing anyone.  You all would be fuzzy blobs.  I would be able to guess that Al and Kathy Bauman would be sitting right about there, and Julie and Phil Hart would be about here, but it would be a guess.

I’m so used to wearing corrective lenses that I don’t think of myself as having a disability.  It’s strange to even say.  But if it were not for these highly engineered pieces of plastic, or the glasses alternative, my experience of the world would be entirely different.  My life would be different.  My disability is easily hidden, to the point of making it functionally go away.

Those of us with bad eyes undergo a mini transformation each morning – so routine, we easily forget how vital it is to our functioning.  We…

Text: John 4:1-30; 39-42

This is a story about a conversation.  It’s heavy on dialogue, short on action.

There’s really not much happening here until the very end.  Jesus and a Samaritan woman meet each other at a well, start talking, and keep talking.  It’s a long conversation – the longest Jesus has with an individual in all the gospels.  It opens with Jesus asking her for a drink of water, but we’re never even told if he ever got it.  The conversation takes over, and turns into something much more than giving and receiving a drink of water from a well.

What makes the conversation remarkable, aside from its length, is that it even happened in the first place.  Neither Jesus nor the Samaritan woman had much business being at that well at that time.

Jesus had been in the Judean countryside, the area around the holy city of Jerusalem.  He’s on his way back to Galilee, his home region.  Up north.  John says, “Jesus left Judea and started back to Galilee.  But he had to go through Samaria.”

If you look on a map, it’s true that as you head north out of Judea, you’ll soon enter the region of Samaria.  Keep on going north through Samaria and eventually you’ll get to Galilee.  It’s a direct shot.  If you’re walking on High Street in the Short North and you want to get to the church, you’re going to have to go by campus.

When John says that Jesus “had to go through Samaria” it wasn’t exactly a geographic necessity.  There was, in fact, a well-traveled route established for the very purpose of avoiding Samaria.  Jews and Samaritans had a difficult and even bloody history together, and so Jewish pilgrims traveling between Galilee and Judea would frequently take a longer route around, on the…

(No recording of this sermon is available.)

Texts: Genesis 12:1-4; John 3:1-12 (see also John 7:45-52; 19:38-42)

Over this past week, I have become absolutely enthralled by Nicodemus.  Who was this pious old man who shows up in the middle of the night?  What brought him out through those moonlit streets to Jesus’ door?  The Pharisees are so often portrayed as the villains in John’s gospel, so what was it about Jesus that had so captured Nicodemus’ attention that he was willing to cross those enemy lines?

What were the questions that were guiding his inward journey, causing his feet to stumble through dark pathways, perhaps risking everything he had built his life around?

And maybe more importantly, what ever happens to Nicodemus in the end?  Does he get it?  Does he find what he is looking for?  Does his inward journey ever connect with his outward journey?  Does he ever experience the new birth Jesus tells him about?

Maybe the question I should be asking is, “Why am I so enthralled by Nicodemus?” 

Nicodemus is a character that shows up only in John’s gospel, but he shows up three separate times, in this passage toward the beginning, another near the middle, and in a final scene toward the end of John.  These three episodes give us just enough of a glimpse into Nicodemus’ journey to make me think that the writer of John is not just relying on a few stock characters and haphazardly peppering them here and there throughout the text.  No, to me, there is something more to the story of Nicodemus. 

And I think I am enthralled by him, because I see myself in that story.  He stokes the fire of my imagination because his journey speaks to and perhaps reflects my own.  In his fumbling through the dark, his confusion, his seeming…