Texts: Isiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12

While I was living in Kansas a few years back, my friend invited me to join her and her family for their annual Halloween gathering.  For them, any holiday was a good excuse to gather, but I was surprised to find out that Halloween seemed to be just as much of a celebration as Thanksgiving or Christmas.  My friend’s aunt’s house was packed with cousins, nieces and nephews, grandparents, and aunts and uncles.  We ate more than we should (a good deal of that being candy).  We carved pumpkins with an intensity that I have never done before, which included printed templates, precision cutting, strategically placed toothpicks to hold together the spots where our cutting was less precise, and a ritualistic lighting of the finished products. 

After a full and rich day, the family gathered around the large dining room table.  We had exhausted all the planned activities, but the conversations were still going strong.  At some point, the conversation turned to which TV shows we thought were worth watching that season.  I don’t remember exactly which guilty pleasures were being discussed, and as a good Mennonite Voluntary Service worker, I watched very little TV at the time, so I was mostly listening. 

A couple minutes into the conversation, my friend’s grandpa, who had also mostly been a spectator in the raucous back and forth that had been happening, interjected from the end of the table, “There are too many gays on TV.”

In the span of approximately one-and-a-half seconds, a number of things happened.  There was a collective intake of breath from nearly everyone there, my friend silently grabbed my leg under the table, I’m sure I probably made a face that was somewhere between surprise and intrigue, and my friend’s mom quickly commandeered the conversation back to…

Texts: Isaiah 2:1-5, Matthew 24:36-44

We’re still a month out from the ball dropping, the changing of our calendars to 2017, but in the liturgical cycle, this is the new year.  Year C has ended, we’re back to Year A, starting today.  The church calendar resets with Advent.  This is day 1.

So we begin.

We begin with birth.  We begin actually before birth.  We begin expecting birth.  We all start out pregnant.  Whether or not you feel it, we start the year collectively in a state of anticipation, watchfulness, alertness.  We are just enough out of sync with our other way of keeping time that it forces us reconsider our frame of reference.  What time is it?

We spent Friday with my family on the farm in Bellefontaine.  As I’m reminded every time we visit, I come from a family that has developed its own unique way of keeping time.  Probably every household has to decide for themselves how to set their clocks.  Do you set them to the actual time, or do you set them slightly ahead so you can get away with leaving the house 8:03, drive for 15 minutes, and still arrive at your destination at exactly quarter after eight?

This maybe isn’t as much an issue in an age when our main time keeper is our always reliable cell phones, but long before those days, the Miller family selected the strategy of mental trickery, setting clocks ahead.  I was never enthusiastic about this, partially because we went well overboard. The main authority on time in the house, a clock that hangs on the wall in the kitchen, still there, was often set 8, 10, even 15 minutes faster than the time that the rest of the world operated on.  The intention was to help us be on time to…

Text: Luke 21:5-19

So first of all, a bit of an explanation why we read from Luke 21 when the bulletin says Mark 1.  With Ted Swartz performing Laughter is Sacred Space this evening, we planned for worship this morning to address a similar theme of mental health.  Out of the many appropriate stories from scripture, I selected Mark 1, Jesus healing a man with leprosy.  There are lots of connections between the stigmas and social isolation of leprosy and mental illness.

But the lectionary gospel for this week is Luke 21.  And while it didn’t initially feel like it fit with our emphasis, the more the week unfolded, the more I was haunted by this passage.  And the more I valued the solidarity that comes with reading the same gospel passage that other Christians around the world are meditating on this morning.  So that’s what we’re going with.  And it will tie back in with mental health.

These are words from today’s lectionary gospel reading.  “Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say ‘I am he.’”  “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.”  “They will arrest you, and persecute you.”  “You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends.”

If someone were to select this passage on their own to read after this past week of all weeks I’d say they were being a little over the top.  Maybe the ecumenical committee that sat down in the mid-1980’s to create the Revised Common Lectionary knew that every so often the placement of this passage would coincide with the Sunday after an election in the United States.  Maybe that was the furthest thing from their mind.  Either way, preachers of this text today at least have the excuse that…

Texts: Hebrews 11:8-10,13-16

At the beginning of the 1500’s, St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome was falling apart.  The structure went all the way back to the 300’s, a project of Constantine the Great, the first Christian Emperor of Rome.  After nearly 1200 years, the building needed some work.  What to do?  Renovate and remodel the existing building, or demolish the old and build something new?  Pope Julius II and the popes that followed went with the second option – out with the old, in with the new, a magnificent structure, still intact, that the American Ralph Waldo Emerson once referred to as “an ornament of the earth…the sublime of the beautiful” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, 7 April 1833) .

For about as long as St. Peter’s had been around, the church had granted some form of indulgences.  This is not to be confused with what we did this past Monday when we granted to our children, and ourselves, that we could indulge in as much of our neighbors’ candy we could eat for one night.  A church- issued indulgence was “a way to reduce the amount of punishment one has to undergo for sin.”  Traditionally, one could receive an indulgence through a prescribed good work or prayer.  In the 1500’s, when funds were tight for rebuilding St. Peter’s, several key leaders had the genius idea to market these indulgences for cash.  Your good work was a donation to the building project, and in turn you received an assurance of less punishment for your sins.

It was the “selling of indulgences” that motivated a German priest by the name of Martin Luther to write his 95 Theses against the corruptions of the church.  That was 1517, 499 years ago.  With the recent invention of the moveable type printing press, the 95 Theses document…

Text: Jeremiah 29:1-14

Today’s sermon was an inteview/dialogue with Jes Buller, Peace Education Coordinator for Mennonite Central Committee US.  We discuss the complicated relationship between peace and justice, the biblical concept of Shalom, her experience working alongside congregations in Colombia, and the resources MCC offers for churches in the US.

Audio only

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