I really like this text. I got more out of the textual study this week than most of the prior weeks. I’m wondering if that was helpful though. There were just so many linkages and promises. You could link old and new testament around the presesnce of God in the Temple and the presence of God in our lives. (Some of which made it in.) You could line Gosple to epistles with the temple made of bricks superceded by the Temple made of flesh and blood. (Some of that got in.) You could go with the Son of David motif. (Some of which got in.) You could be systematic about it and talk in three points about the different types of authority we live under and that Jesus is the authority. (This gave me the intro and the closing.) And I haven’t even got to my favorite insight from the week in connection with Acts, how in Acts 3 – 4 the same type of authority question with the same players happens, but so much is flipped, and the comparison makes so clear that Jesus is now on the throne instead of in the state of humiliation. (None of that made it in.) Usually a single line of thought jumps out at me early and I just don’t have to think about others. This week all those individual sermons were jumping around and I had to prune it down. I have a sinking feeling I didn’t do that enough.

A couple of comments thought it was good. A couple of comments noted reading other material. I have a feeling it was tougher to follow. As much as I edited and edited and tried to choose and make one coherent theme, I think the others kept intruding – which means that I was probably talking to myself as I was the only one who had the background.

Grace is strange. On a day when your head seems to be elsewhere (like forgetting to take the offering and moving it later in the service) you get a sermon that you still like. Pure grace.

Grace is just on the border of our experience. That we can recognize it seems to me a strong argument for God. Kinda like that old Police song, there has to be an invisible sun, gives its heat to every one. When the world is nasty, brutish and short, we catch a ray of grace. A glimpse of the divine economy. When the market is down and fear overwhelms and attendance is not where you’d like it, some small piece of grace seems to balance all the scales – no drives them completely out of balance. Like only underserved and unlimited grace can do.

The word cloud for this week is stark. I didn’t change anything in how it came back. Usally I’ll change the color scheme or try and get it to give me a word in a different location. This week the Black and White with Debt at so starkly contrasted to Jesus seemed correct. Out debt is rediculously large and stark, but the answer is Jesus.

In writing the presenting I had two concerns. 1) I did not address 9/11. In the past few years that would have be gross negligence in reading the context of the congregation’s life. When I learned that the twin spotlights were allowed to fade with the morning light on 9/12 this year, I thought that the commemorations had there proper ending. 2) I started in the introduction with monetary debt and relatively quickly transition to moral debt. I feared that I might have brought up uncertainty or fear without addressing it. In that I decided I paralleled the parable. It starts out as just a king settling accounts. It quickly gets to the point where we are not talking about just money or talents. After it makes that transition it doesn’t go back. The temporal points to the eternal. The eternal overshaddows the temporal. If we have eternal peace with God because He has removed those 10,000 talents of sin, then the troubles of today may not disappear, but they are put in the proper context.

Blessings on your week.

This Sunday was our Rally Day, the start of sunday school. We have a small sunday school that is just getting restarted. Some would probably say it isn’t worthwhile, but in general I think based partly on Matt 18 and a lot on other places, that is not an option of a church. The congregation that refuses to instruct its kids is building up some serious debts I’d rather not consider.

In any case, since the order of service was full, this sermon is a good page shorter than normal. The Word Cloud is interesting in that there are a whole bunch of words that end up roughly the same size. It was also interesting to me that Jesus was still on of the largest. While writing and delivering, I felt this sermon was a large amount of law and little gospel. I was concerned about that. If my training had been Reformed instead of Lutheran it would not have been as big a problem. The text for the day provided the outline. Big chunks of it were law (i.e. do this, don’t do that) from Jesus. It is very textual, but almost becuase of that I felt skewed to the law. The word cloud makes me feel better. As long as Jesus is big in the cloud, the gospel should come through louder.

Overall I got the impression that there are some real strong moments, if you tracked with the sermon, but if you didn’t it was probably rather dry. If you didn’t get the law proclamation and feel convicted, then the gospel and how we live together probably didn’t make much sense. I saw some faces that were clearly with me, and some very bored.