Luke 4:21-30 Sermon almost preached at Gorbals Parish Church, January 31st 2010 – Fourth Sunday after Epiphany.The service was cancelled due to maintanance work on the building which hosts our congregation.
When I read the passage I was going to preach on, I knew I was in trouble. Because, if you read that passage carefully, you will realize that after Jesus preached in the synagogue, people took him outside of their town and almost threw him off a cliff. So, the logical conclusion is this: if I get this sermon right, you may just want to do the same to me. Well, that doesn’t sound very good. I’m glad this building is not very tall, and there are no hills within walking distance. Nevertheless, just to be on the safe side, I think I will try to get this one wrong. It’s OK to be wrong from time to time. It keeps me humble…
So what is happening here? Why are these people so angered? What set them off? When Jesus quoted from the prophet Isaiah and announced good news for the poor, release to captives, sight to the blind, and freedom from oppression, they all loved it. And when he told them that ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’, Luke tells us that they ‘all spoke well of him and marvelled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth’.
Luke 4:14-21 Sermon preached at Gorbals Parish Church, January 24th 2010 – Third Sunday after Epiphany.
Two weeks ago I was away at a Probationers’ Conference for about four days. It was really good to catch up with friends, to exchange stories from the churches where we are all working and training for ministry, and to learn about the things we will have to deal with after the end of our training. Training sessions were great, but we always seem to get a lot more from the more informal, personal interactions between and after sessions, when we discuss things in detail and we try to figure out how the theory applies in our everyday life of ministry. The whole conference was centred on the issue of mission, which fits so well with today’s Gospel reading.
I love this little clip with Eugene Peterson, the translator of The Message, where he makes the case for leaving space for a response in preaching, and also leaving space for ambiguity. If you want to communicate precise things, you need mathematics, he says. What an excellent point that is! I can really connect to everything he says about the use and nature of language. See what you make of this:
John 1:1-18 Sermon preached at Gorbals Parish Church, January 3rd 2010 – Second Sunday of Christmas.
What a privilege it is for me to the one to preach the first sermon of the New Year! I’m very excited about this assignment, especially since it’s not immediately after Hogmanay, so we’re all fully awake, well rested, and ready for the new year. I can see the excitement and anticipation on your faces!
Of course, because it’s the first Sunday of the year, we are all thinking about what the new year will bring. Also, it’s the time for making new year resolutions. Any big plans this year? Anything exciting in store?
I’m never good at new year resolutions. I don’t like to make promises I know I will never keep. “Oh, this year I will not drink coffee. Just tea!” Yeah, right! Who are you kidding? “This year I will be nice to my wife, to my kids, to my parents, to my in-laws, to my supervisor…” Yeah, sure. We’ve heard that before! You can try, but you know you’re going to fail at some point. You see what I mean? Resolutions are very difficult.
This December Romania celebrated twenty years since the fall of communism. In many ways, I cannot believe it’s been twenty years already, mostly because I expected a lot more to happen in my native country in twenty years, but also because I can’t believe it’s been twenty years since I was a preteen – fourteen to be more exact. This is crazy! I still remember growing up under communism, being constantly afraid of the secret police and mindful that they are listening to our private conversations.
Here’s a magical quote from Dear Church. Letters from a Disillusioned generation, by Sarah Cunningham. Even if it is slightly American, I think it works everywhere. See what you think of it, but for me it is another proof that media gimmicks and contemporary music are not enough for a new reformation of the church. Something else is needed.
“Thanks to our rapid culture, it can be easy to assume that twentysomethings crave a church of constantly changing flash animation and live-action video footage. But I should let you in on a secret: while twentysomethings appreciate and are familiar with multilayered technology, we are actually very skeptical of our media-driven advertising-crazed world.
I’ve come across this lecture by Rev David Simmons, an Episcopal priest from the US, entitled Literalism: The Heresy of the 20th Century. I had never heard biblical literalism described as a heresy before, which is why it caught my attention. It is a very interesting overview of how the Scriptures came to be interpreted literally in modernism and what are the implications of such an approach to Scripture. See what you make of it.
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting rather tired of watching clergy and apologists defending the church. There is so much energy being spent in defending the church against Atheism, or Antitheism or any other theism for that matter, that there is no energy left for moving forward. Every single debate I watch in which the church is involved in a way or another, the church’s representatives have the bad habit of over-emphasizing the good that the church has done in society in the past, and minimizing the mistakes at the same time. I think that is rather distasteful and counterproductive, which is probably why I’m not an apologist.
Since I started this blog I noticed a very strange temptation to look back and evaluate my past to death. I even scrapped a very tough article entitled ‘Fundamentalists Anonymous’ after working on it for several hours. It comes a time, I think, when you have let go of the past, get over it, and look into the future.
I admit that I’m a bit troubled by the temptations which this blog are springing on me, especially when it is so widely accessible, and people from my past are constantly shocked by how far I moved on in my thinking from a fundamentalist position to a progressive and inquisitive one. To be dragged into endless discussions about what made me move on is very unattractive to me, not to mention painful because of memories I’d rather leave behind.
I have been thinking lately about the atonement, and especially about the substitutionary atonement, as it is clasically understood in most Evangelical circles (of which I am a product, even if I moved on). I heard some good questions about this:
Did God have to kill Jesus in order to forgive me?
If God was unable to forgive me without killing his Son, then how come he asks me to forgive others?
He doesn’t ask me to forgive my wife, and then go and beat the dog.
Is God asking me to do something that he is not capable of himself?
I think these are all good questions. Here are some quotes from John McLeod Campbell, a celebrated Scottish theologian of the mid nineteenth century, in his book, The Nature of the Atonement. I found him very helpful in this area:
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