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Acts 19:1-7
Epiphany 1B
The woman who told me with a puzzled look on her face, “I don’t think anyone here has the Holy Spirit,” had been part of a church community I pastored for about six months. Yet in that short time she’d concluded that members of our church didn’t have the Holy Spirit. So she sadly left…
John 1:(1-9), 10-18
Christmas 2B
As we come to the first Sunday of 2021, most of us are only too glad to have left 2020 behind. If on New Year’s Eve a year ago we toasted the happy arrival of a new year, this past week we probably did less of a toast to welcome 2021 and offered up instead…
Ephesians 1:3-14
Christmas 2B
Christians know that God didn’t create us to “eat, drink and be merry because tomorrow we die.” Yet that popular philosophy raises a number of interesting questions. It makes us wonder how God’s people should evaluate the purpose of our lives. Something in a sermon by the Rev. Fleming Rutledge stimulated my thinking about that…
Luke 2:22-40
Christmas 1B
It’s amazing how much detail Luke gives us. If Luke were a movie, it would have been directed by Cecil B. DeMille with a cast of thousands and long, lingering scenes on most every situation imaginable. The Gospel of Mark by comparison is like a PowerPoint presentation where the presenter goes way too fast through…
Galatians 4:4-7
Christmas 1B
Simeon, Luke tells us, “was waiting for the consolation of Israel.” However, most of us don’t like to wait. In fact, nearly every year at Christmastime my wife and I have a quiet debate about waiting. It’s not about how long to wait to buy Christmas presents or put up our Christmas tree. Our annual…
Luke 1:26-38
Advent 4B
Biblical scholars call passages like Luke 1 “type scenes.” A modern kind of “type scene” might be something like this: one evening while channel-surfing, you run across a movie already in progress. It’s obviously a Western with two cowboys standing about thirty yards apart in the middle of a dusty street. Each man is glaring…
Romans 16:25-27
Advent 4B
I suspect that were Romans 16’s proclaimers to ask our hearers which of the Bible’s books are the most “theological,” at least some of them would answer “Romans.” Its themes of human sinfulness, righteousness from God and the need for appropriate responses to God’s grace run throughout this letter. Romans is also Paul’s letter that…
John 1:6-8, 19-28
Advent 3B
“Among you stands one you do not know.” Those were John the Baptist’s words as recorded in John 1:26. Of course, at that time it was literally true that a quiet carpenter’s son from the backwaters of the Roman Empire was rubbing shoulders with lots of people—including the crowds that jostled together at the banks…
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
Advent 3B
Paul certainly had lofty ideals for the Christian Church. At the beginning of his first letter to Thessalonica’s Christians, he describes the Church as a community loved and chosen by God. That community, the apostle adds, draws its life from God and lives that life with faith, love and hope. When Paul concludes this letter…
Mark 1:1-8
Advent 2B
Imagine yourself a Kindergarten teacher who gathers a group of wide-eyed five-and six-year-olds onto the square of carpeting in the classroom that is reserved for “Story Time.” You smile into their innocent faces and begin your story. “Once upon a time a little girl named Goldilocks was fast asleep in a lovely little bed—a bed…
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