Text: Matthew 6:9-13

When Jesus taught his disciples how to pray, he taught them to say: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  Jesus spoke often of the Kingdom of God, or, the Kingdom of Heaven, and remarkably, taught that it was already at hand, near, already present.  Some scholars have emphasized how Jesus presented the Kingdom of God as an alternative to the Kingdom of Rome.  Others have noted its essential grounding in Jewish understanding of redemption and salvation.  The Kingdom of God is a reality in which relationships are mended, or mending, and creation is freed up to become a fuller and fuller manifestation of goodness and beauty and creative outpouring.

In our religious vocabulary we have developed the notion of us going to heaven, but in Jesus’ ministry and in the prayer he taught us, he emphasized the flow going in the exact opposite direction.  Heaven is coming to us, breaks in at unexpected times in unexpected places.  Your kingdom come on earth, as is already is in heaven.

The universal nature of this kingdom, which spans all ethnic and national divides of persons, means that, by way of happy coincidence of the English language, the kingdom of God is just as much the kin-dom of God, the family under Divine care.  And so in a time when kings are less prominent, but when the kin-ship of humanity and other living things is fragile at best, our prayers can also be that the kin-dom of God come on earth as it is in heaven.

We are blessed in this congregation with people who have spent significant amounts of time in other parts of the world – who have seen unique glimpses of the kin-dom of God.  So on this World Fellowship Sunday, I…

Texts: 1 Samuel 3:1-10; John 1:43-51

The image behind me, also printed on your bulletins, is a stained glass window in 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.  It was a gift from the people of Wales, after that church was bombed in September, 1963, less than three weeks after the March on Washington and King’s “I have a dream” speech.  Four black girls died in that bombing.

Much transpired between the giving of that iconic speech and the words King delivered at Stanford University in April, 1967. Less than a year after that he was killed at the age of 39.  King still expresses hope in the words we have been hearing this morning from that speech, but they are tempered by the continued resistance and outright violence and hatred directed against blacks and the civil rights movement.  The new movie Selma, which I hope all of us have a chance to see sometime, is set in 1965, and is one of those events that happened after the hopeful and beautiful dream of 1963 spoken in Washington DC, and before the more solemn and urgent plea of 1967, spoken at Stanford.  Because we are listening to some of that speech today, my words will be brief.

Last week Joseph Sprague spoke to the racial inequalities in our prisons and criminal justice systems.  The recent police shootings of black males and grand jury trials have highlighted continuing racial disparities both in attitudes and in systemic injustice.  And here we are, on the weekend our nation has set aside to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

It’s important for us to hear together these challenging words from the King of 1967.  “What I’m trying to get across is that our nation has constantly taken a positive step forward on the…

Text: Jeremiah 32:6-15

Speaker: C. Joseph Sprague

Audio only

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Text: Matthew 2:1-12

For most of the last dozen years, between Christmas and New Year’s, Abbie and I have made the trek out to Western Kansas.  This is where Abbie grew up and where much of her extended family still lives.  Because it’s such a long drive we stay for over a week.  It’s a pretty laid back time.  We visit with family, maybe do a project in Grandpa Marlin’s woodshop, read, play games, eat, etc.  This year included some playing in the little bit of snow that fell a couple days after Christmas.

Some of you may know Kansas as that long stretch of nothing before you get to the mountains.  And you’d be mostly right.

What’s especially wonderful about Western Kansas is that it’s almost nothing.  When you get out of the car and spend some time there, there’s a rare spaciousness all around you, full of almost nothing.  It’s a place where the Advent prophecy of Isaiah has been fulfilled:  Every valley has been lifted up, every mountain and hill has been made low; the uneven ground has become level, and the rough places a plain.  Take a walk or a run on a dirt road outside Quinter, Kansas and you can see for miles:  just try to plan it so the wind is at your back when you turn around to make your way back to where you started.

Because of the time of year when we do this trip, it has come to serve as something of a buffer zone between years:  To reflect some on what has happened in the past year, but moreso to clear my mind and do some thinking about the year to come, which is still as open as a Kansas landscape, almost nothing.

On the church calendar the trip ends up occurring at…

Text: Matthew 2:1-12

For most of the last dozen years, between Christmas and New Year’s, Abbie and I have made the trek out to Western Kansas.  This is where Abbie grew up and where much of her extended family still lives.  Because it’s such a long drive we stay for over a week.  It’s a pretty laid back time.  We visit with family, maybe do a project in Grandpa Marlin’s woodshop, read, play games, eat, etc.  This year included some playing in the little bit of snow that fell a couple days after Christmas.

Some of you may know Kansas as that long stretch of nothing before you get to the mountains.  And you’d be mostly right.

What’s especially wonderful about Western Kansas is that it’s almost nothing.  When you get out of the car and spend some time there, there’s a rare spaciousness all around you, full of almost nothing.  It’s a place where the Advent prophecy of Isaiah has been fulfilled:  Every valley has been lifted up, every mountain and hill has been made low; the uneven ground has become level, and the rough places a plain.  Take a walk or a run on a dirt road outside Quinter, Kansas and you can see for miles:  just try to plan it so the wind is at your back when you turn around to make your way back to where you started.

Because of the time of year when we do this trip, it has come to serve as something of a buffer zone between years:  To reflect some on what has happened in the past year, but moreso to clear my mind and do some thinking about the year to come, which is still as open as a Kansas landscape, almost nothing.

On the church calendar the trip ends up occurring at…