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A Change of Plans
“A CHANGE OF PLANS” December 18, 2016 – 8:30 am Rev. Len Vander Zee Church of the Servant Sermons
Disappointed with Jesus
Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another? That’s one of the most haunting questions in the whole Bible. And look who’s asking it. John the Baptist, that tough, seasoned prophet who preached repentance. John the Baptist who stood up to the Pharisees and Sadducees out there in…
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Proper 28C
Paul spends relatively little time in his second letter to Thessalonica’s Christians talking about Christian ethics. He might have spent that addressing things like healthy relationships and the proper attitude toward those in authority, as he does in his other epistles. However, in this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson the apostle talks, instead, about Christians’ work. Both…
Luke 21:5-19
Proper 28C
Luke likely wrote his gospel and the Acts of the Apostles around 80 AD. In other words, Luke already knew how the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, and had already witnessed the persecution of the church and its leaders. Luke lived through and witnessed new followers of the Jesus Way be put to death for…
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Proper 27C
Paul spends much of his letters to Thessalonica’s Christians talking about Jesus’ second coming, about what he calls in this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s verse 2 “the day of the Lord.” That, however, may seem like an odd topic for the Lectionary to call Christians to contemplate just weeks before our celebration of Jesus’ first coming….
Luke 20:27-38
Proper 27C
It is interesting that the Sadducees are the ones to pose this particular question to Jesus because they did not believe in a heaven. Using this story about a wife of seven brothers, they believe, will show the absurdity of the concept. To put it in its most basic summary form, the Sadducees believed that…
Christmas A: Flutter of Angels
The Advent world is a world of angels. It’s a world alive with the flutter of angels. Our world, in contrast, is inhospitable to angels. It seems totally void of angels. This discrepancy between the Advent world and our world is the thought behind H. G. Well’s story, “The Wonderful Visit.” One day, so this…
Christmas Eve Year A Meditation: Christmas
We can hear this story over and over again, and never really get tired of it. Our imagination takes over and we see the scene with our mind’s eye. Mary and Joseph, tired, exhausted after their long journey. We can smell the stable, that pungent mixture of dung and hay. We can hear the animals…
Luke 19:1-10
Proper 26C
Both Zacchaeus and Jesus are depicted as seeking in this story. In fact, seeking, or seeing, is a central and repeated theme in the passage. Zacchaeus wants to see, Jesus is seeking, the crowd sees. We readers are even pulled into the story through seeing: Luke starts with giving us details about Zacchaeus, but does…
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