When I was in seminary, I had a professor who always said that when you are trying to decide which reading to preach on to “find the passage that begs a lot of questions and preach on that.” And our reading from Proverbs today certainly does that. “A capable wife who can find?... She is far more precious than jewels. She girds herself with strength, and makes her arms strong…She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue….”
Read MoreIn today’s Gospel, Jesus has just had a dust-up with the Pharisees, the religious authorities who were always challenging his teachings. Jesus has just called them hypocrites and chastised them for failing to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” as the law of Moses demands. Then Jesus leaves the predominately Jewish region where he has been preaching and teaching and heads to a mostly Gentile, or non-Jewish area. He wants to keep a low profile, according to Mark, but the news of his healing ministry has preceded him, and a Gentile woman approaches him and throws herself at his feet. She is desperate because her little girl has an “unclean spirit”. This could have been a physical illness, a mental health issue or something else. We just know that the little girl was seriously unwell in some way and that her mother is beside herself with worry. She has heard that this wandering preacher heals people.
Read MoreHello, my friends! It is so good to see all of you! I am very happy to be back with you after my sabbatical. My time away was wonderful, refreshing in so many ways. We had time for travel, time with family and friends, time in creation, and time at home. I came back on Tuesday and wow, what a lot of great happenings to get caught up on! The top hits of the summer seemed to have been the preaching series, the youth service trip and the choir residency in Gloucester. So much life, so much joy, so much for which to give thanks.
Read More’d like to tell you a story today. It was written in 1897 and the title of the story is The Happy Hypocrite: A Fairy Tale for Tired Men, which I think is a hilarious title. The story goes like this. There was a man named George Hell (which is also very funny) and George was a selfish man of many appetites. He was a gambler, a flirt, and he loved nothing more than a raucous all-night party. Then one day he met an incredible woman named Jenny and became enraptured with her. Now Jenny was everything that George was not. She was selfless and kind, generous and humble, and she loved God far more than any worldly delight. Hopelessly smitten by her goodness, the scoundrel George confessed his love and asked for Jenny’s hand in marriage, but Jenny playfully replied that she would only marry a man with the face of a saint.
Read MoreI have a dog who is what dog trainers call “food-motivated.” I gather that not all dogs are like this—I have friends who have a dog who, when they put food down for her, will eat a few bites and then walk away. Not our dog—when we put her food down, she eats it in approximately 15 seconds and then looks up at us, expectantly, as if to say: “is there any more?”
Whether or not all dogs are food-motivated, I’d venture to say that all of us humans are, at one level or another, food-motivated. We are hungry beings. We are bodies that need to be fed, and this is why Jesus meets us through giving us food and drink. This is why the only one of Jesus’ miracles to be recounted in all four Gospels (and twice in Mark and Matthew) is the feeding of the multitudes. This is also why the feeding of the 5000 in John’s Gospel unfolds into Jesus’ longest discourse in John, and also, in the church’s lectionary, is spread over five weeks. We began hearing the story last week, and the implications of this miraculous feeding continue to unfold, in our Gospel readings, this week and for the next three weeks after that—because this feeding story speaks to our most basic physical need.
Read MoreAlright, I’m gonna just jump right into the Gospel today. The feeding of the five thousand. This is one of Jesus’s most iconic miracles, so iconic, in fact, that it’s the only one of his miracles to appear in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, so it’s clearly important. Now, there are two common interpretations of this miracle and I’d like to lay them both out for you and then we’ll work on figuring out what we should take from this event. The first interpretation is that this is truly a miracle, a miracle of bread being physically multiplied by Jesus. The second is that it’s more of a miracle of people sharing what they already have. I’ll start with the first interpretation, the miracle of multiplication.
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