Sermons

Jesus this evening has raised Lazarus. He’s predicted his own death. He knows its coming. Still he goes to pray that it might happen another way. That we might hear his message, that those who’ve followed him and heard him speaking clearly in the synagogues will love one another. But they don’t. We don’t.

God-made-flesh in Jesus joins us in our humanity so much that he joins us in death. While Jesus is feeling abandoned God stands in solidarity with those who die senseless deaths. While Isabel Andrade mourned the impending death of her daughter and granddaughter God was with her knowing the pain of losing a child.

“Before the Church hears about Jesus’ death we hear about God opening graves breathing life into long-dead bones with long-dead muscle, sinew, and skin. As we come to the end of Lent we hear about opening graves because that’s what Lent is about.”

Jesus is the living water who knows everything we’ve ever done and calls us still to the well of that living water… Fasting, the most well known practice, is done so that we’re ready to meet Jesus by the well, to meet him by the font at the Easter Vigil… Jesus has come to bring us and to be for us a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.

ReBorn Spiritual rebirth, Re-birth, Born again, Reborn, Reawakened, Found, or Redeemed all mean one thing, transformation. Simply put, we become believers in Jesus. We choose to reject the persuasion of others and Jesus becomes the influencer of our thoughts, words and actions in relationships and those we direct toward ourselves. It is a Calling, not

While we don’t face temptations exactly like Jesus faces here, we are tempted nonetheless. For some of us a few days into our Lenten fasts we’ve broken them. We may be tempted to fully count ourselves failures or tempted to just shrug it off as not having mattered anyway. While the lectionary fails spectacularly at showing Jesus being tempted in every way that we were, it nonetheless shows that Jesus faced temptations. The mundane, real-life, day-to-day temptations that we give in to or resist, Jesus faced too.

If our lives are not transformed by meeting Jesus the Christ by encountering the true and living God the encounter is for naught. In seeing Jesus’ transfigured body in holding him in our hands as Bread God admonishes us to listen to Jesus. Mountain top experiences going to thin places are for the good of the world not just the good of our feelings.

In these directions Jesus uses what would have been a familiar rabbinical rhetorical device where the second statement seeks to deepen, intensify and radicalize the first. Jesus has made clear that he has not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. The Law has been a gift from God. What Jesus pulls those committed to following him toward is that keeping the mere letter of the law is not enough. Love itself must be the true guide.