Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6:14-24
I’m not sure why John left this story of Jesus walking on the water where it is. (Not being sure – that’s going to be a theme here, so stick with it.) We just transitioned into John’s gospel this week, after reading the story of the feeding of the 5,000 from Mark last week. But in both Mark and John, Jesus goes from feeding the 5,000 to walking across Lake Galilee. What gets me is that next – after this story – Jesus goes on for another 34 verses explaining the feeding of the 5,000. So John has Jesus explain the significance of the only miracle that’s important enough to be recorded in all four gospels, and he takes all this time before it for Jesus to walk across the water? We’re about to spend a month in this chapter of John because Jesus spends that long explaining the feeding, and we have to go across the lake first?
I think (and again, I’m no more sure than any of you) that John left this story here because it tells us what kind of explanation Jesus is going to give us. He’s going to tell us about God’s ways in the flesh, which is nothing we quite arrive at, just something we can move toward. That’s what Jesus shows the crowd when they go looking for him. He’s always one step beyond them, because the grace and truth that came into human flesh with him cannot be grasped for our purposes (like to enthrone a king who will make all our needs go away). Instead, they draw us out of ourselves and into a search: the search for God’s depth within our lives and God’s direction through the signs around us. That’s the truth as I understand it, and even so, it makes me uncomfortable. (more…)
Ephesians 2:11-22
Mark 6:30-44
I grew up in farm country, and farmers generally fall into two camps: those who use John Deere tractors and those who use International Harvester tractors. People in each of these camps swear by their brand. They wear baseball caps with one or the other logo on them. Some of them decorate their houses in green or red, depending on their brand loyalty. People who take their brands this seriously even claim that theirs is of far superior quality, as if they expect the other brand’s wheels to fall off every 300 feet or something.
People in other areas are not usually so rabid about brand differences (although they’re not usually so dependent on their equipment, either) – but some do insist on one make of pickup or snowmobile. Someone was even clever enough to come up with a set of inappropriate bumper stickers making it explicit that “my” truck brand is better than “yours.” As far as I can tell from the bumper stickers, the three U.S. truck brands are each better than the other two, like Detroit is one giant game of rock-paper-scissors. That, of course, is clearly not the case. It may be that one brand of truck (or snowmobile) is better than the others for a particular purpose, but that’s not the truth of these stickers. It’s basically about a person’s individual preference. (more…)
2 Samuel 6:1-11
Mark 6:14-29
I need to talk to you today about a very important subject: the dangers of getting too close to God. Janet told us about Uzzah, the son of Abinadab, being struck dead – zapped – because he reached out and touched God’s covenant box. Now, you could say it was Uzzah’s own fault for touching the Ark, or King David’s fault for putting the Ark on a cart, but isn’t that just looking to place the blame? The real issue is that too many people all throughout history have been zapped for just this reason. Just like Uzzah, too many people have gotten themselves into the presence of the Most Holy God, and they’ve been zapped.
This is a warning we all need to hear, because we face this danger every day in our homes, at work, even right here at church. Uzzah is not the only one to have been zapped. Just this morning, we also read about the zapping of John the Baptist. This week at Vacation Bible School, we’ll be visiting with the apostle Paul during the time just before he too was zapped. I could go on: Stephen, Peter, Perpetua, Joan of Arc, Oscar Romero. Most people survive the experience, like Teresa of Avila, John Calvin, or Dorothy Day, but even they bear the marks of being zapped forever. What happened to Uzzah has happened to many others, because they obviously didn’t understand the risk. (more…)
Mark 6:1-13
2 Corinthians 2:1-10
Two of my friends are on separate trips to Italy, and I’ve been looking at the photos they post on Facebook (apparently it’s much more fun to see people’s vacation pictures when they’re not narrating them for you). They post photos of beautiful old religious sites: humble baptistries, magnificent cathedrals and basilicas, and the marvelous artwork that goes along with them. Some of the photos are of the Papal Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, which is not quite as ostentatious as some other locations, but it’s still pretty grand. Now, St. Francis’ vision of the Good News led him to a life of strict humility and poverty, so I wonder just how he would have felt about having a magnificent church built in his honor.
He would have understood the need, I’m sure, whatever he thought of our actually putting up a building. As creatures of this human world, we’re not comfortable with the kind of voluntary poverty and powerlessness Francis identified as central to the Christian life. We can’t automatically make sense of a God who expresses power through a life that leads ultimately to death and only then to resurrection. We’d much rather see God glorified, see the magnificence of God demonstrated through a display of what we would recognize as power. This is what has led us, from the first times our ancestors recognized Divinity, to imagine God like a powerful human, only more so. We do this because that’s how we imagine power. (more…)
