Sermons

Following Jesus, proclaiming that the kingdom of of heaven has come near, living how he taught to live, and enacting God’s unlimited love… is going to cause problems in interpersonal relationships. When Jesus talks about people close to us that doesn’t just mean families. It means literal neighbors, too.

On the surface, todays Gospel reading is straight forward. Jesus sends the disciples out on mission, tells them to whom they should go, gives them travelling instructions and warns them of the cranky people they will encounter. AAA and Rick Steve’s Travel Guides.When Joseph asked me to preach this Sunday, I read the passage from

The passages we hear today aren’t about us and how we’re supposed to act. The passages today are about God: God’s deep love for humanity, God’s desire for us to be in right relationship, and God’s willingness to short-circuit certain rules because the healthy don’t need a physician.

Three Persons, One God: a mystical dance of union and unity, a mystical dance of wholeness and division between the creator of all things who broke into time to redeem all things, and who sent themself to draw us into their work of reconciliation… Joined to God in baptism, joined to Jesus’ death and resurrection as we are born by water and the Spirit, we are made part of the community that professes Jesus the Christ crucified and resurrected.

The breath of God, fire, God within and around us. Through our readings today, on this day of Pentecost, we get an intoxicating feeling of being surrounded and held up by the mysterious power and presence of God through the Holy Spirit. Every year on this day, as we read together from the Acts of

Come behold the wondrous mystery/Slain by death the God of life/But no grave could e’er restrain Him/Praise the Lord; He is alive!/What a foretaste of deliverance/How unwavering our hope/Christ in power resurrected/As we will be when he comes.

This is Jesus making an authoritative claim to be the way of salvation, salvation for the whole of the cosmos. Jesus’ being the way is not being the access point, a directive to turn or burn. Rather Jesus through Jesus — because of Jesus — we have the truths of God and through those truths we have life abundant….None of the Abrahamic religions’ truth claims is a call to dominance. Rather each of them is a call to their adherents to embrace the love of God and do the work God has given them to do. They’re calls to deepen one’s faith and trust in the fullness and goodness of God.