Author: Parson Brown

The Location of Security

2214wordle

Biblical Text: Luke 2:22-40
Full Sermon Text

If you ask the question How do you know, the vast majority of answers come down to some form of “internal” knowledge. Whether that knowledge is feelings or intellectual or sensory it depends upon you. Yet all of those things are highly suspect. Which is part of the good news. The acts of God come from outside of us. Christ came into the world, to us, but remained what he was. Jesus himself is the light of revelation to the Gentiles as Simeon sings. Part of what he reveals is our salvation. And that doesn’t depend on us or anything in us.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Fishers of Men – Four Pictures of the Vocation of Following Jesus

12614wordle

Biblical Text: Matthew 4:12-25
Full Sermon Draft

The biblical text is Jesus calling two sets of brothers. It is sandwiched between a notice about John the Baptist and a notice about what the Galilean ministry looked like. So the theme is vocation or call. What does it mean to be called? What does this particular call – to follow Jesus – mean? This sermon looks at four pictures and hones in on one theme of all four. The call of discipleship must take primacy or it means nothing.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

What are You Seeking?

11914wordle

Biblical Text: John 1:29-42
Full Sermon Draft

That title was Jesus’ first question of two would-be disciples. It still stands for all would-be disciples. What are you seeking? At the level of first things there are only two answers. This sermon looks is about that question, those answers and what they mean for us.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Identifying Down – Standing with Sinners

wordle11214

Biblical Texts: Matthew 3:13-17, Isaiah 42:1-9, Romans 6:1-11
Full Sermon Draft

Put Lorde, JC Penney, Marketing, the Pope, John the Baptist and Jesus into the sermonic blender and what do you get? A meditation on identity. And the good news of how Jesus has given us a solid one. Done simply by standing with sinners. Give it a listen. (Although I’ve been warned that I’m competing with an aggressive young toddler.)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Divine Necessity & Our Necessity

1514wordle

Text: Luke 2:40-52
Full Sermon Draft

The first words of Jesus recorded in Luke contain what the ESV translates as “must”. It is a little word, that signals big things – the divine necessity. This is why Jesus came, to take care of the things of his Father. The extra file here looks at all the uses of this word in the Gospel according to Luke.
Must in Luke

I think what you can see is exactly what the things of the Father are. You can also start to see what the things we “ought” to do are. And you can see the conflict as at one point the Synagogue tries to put an ought on Jesus rejecting his. The switch from must to ought in translation is revealing. Jesus must and can, while we ought to but can’t. Good think the one covers the other.

The last note really is one the attitude of the heart, captured by Mary, that allows for the reception of wisdom that we can’t receive by natural means from simple piety to learned study.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Innocents and The Nazarene

122913wordle

Biblical Text: Matt 2:13-23
Full Sermon Draft

Reading the Gospel of Matthew, especially these early infancy chapters, is a small study in how to read scripture. Matthew’s story and his argument is scriptural. It is also historical based in the life of Israel, but more scriptural because the true meaning of Israel’s history is captured in scripture. The purpose of Matthew’s gospel is to reveal Jesus as the fulfillment of history. And to ponder the strangeness of this revelation that He will be called a Nazarene.

So the opening here is slightly more didactic or teaching in purpose than normal. I think the text invites that, and the context of modern America with all kinds of “Bad Scripture Reading” being paraded as wisdom also calls for it. I hope that the teaching bit helps with the proclamation of the fulfillment passages. My prayer is that being willing to take scripture on its own terms, will open up the grace of God in the midst of horror. And how The Nazarene helps us to receive it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

This Child For You – Christmas Eve

Scan_Pic0003

Full Sermon Draft

This was the message from our Christmas Eve service of lessons and carols. The sermon references many of the key lines from the lessons and how the carols reflect the teaching. I think it stands on its own, but you don’t get the candles and Silent Night.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

God is No Repsecter of Shame

121513wordle

Biblical Text: Matt 1:18-25
draft 1.0

I’ve just start reading this book, only just past the theses declarations, but I’m somewhat amazed at them. The book is supposed to be the culmination of a generations scholarship on sexuality in the ancient world. And that culmination is supposed to be the upsetting of prior or simplistic thinking. This is what is startling to me: his theses are more or less what I have been taught my entire benighted life in the church and that horrible bastion of it called the LCMS. My guess at what that means is that scholarship is now distant enough from the church that it can “discover” the church’s understanding and roughly agree with it without really knowing.

How does that intersect with a small parish sermon. Well, the text is Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus. (Our kids program is next week, so instead of doing John the Baptist, The Return we took Advent 4’s texts on Advent 3.) And Matthew’s account is really about the virgin birth. Coming off of the genealogy, Matthew had something to explain and an Old Testament prophecy to link in (Isaiah 7:14). In the ancient world (which the modern world is growing ever closer to) shame was the regulatory principle. Actions were governed less by any personal sense of a cosmic right and wrong but more by a social agreement upon what is honorable and what brings dis-honor or shame. The gospel disrupts all of that. It is a proclamation of freedom. Freedom from shame and freedom for right action. The core of the shame system was slavery. A slave could not have honor, so it didn’t matter how they were treated. And many were treated as sex slaves. It was an everyday occurrence. So, sexuality would be a defining sphere of shame. Caesar’s wife had to be beyond repute because Caesar was at the top of the honor pyramid and less than that would bring shame. And you can fill in the rest from slave to Caesar and all the forms of human sexuality.

Now the Jews had a much better grasp of sin or personal adherence to a cosmic code, but they were always fighting the honor system. Think of every time Jesus goes to a meal with the Pharisees and takes note of how they are sitting(Luke 14:7) or mocks those who like to parade around in fancy clothes (Mark 12:38-40). Pure honor/shame status clubs. Hence why Jesus calls the woman giving two mites better because she is much closer to the cosmic standard of justice.

Then comes the story of Joseph and pregnant Mary. This is pure shame vs. sin. Mary is sinless. The child is from the Holy Spirit. This is how God has chosen to act. How God has chosen to act, if Joseph goes along with it will bring him great shame. His village was still calling Jesus “Mary’s Child” at the start of his ministry (Mark 6:3). Honor/shame called for stoning. God said this is how I am going to save my people. Honor/shame says that God couldn’t be associated with anything that is shameful or lowering of status. God is born as a baby from a humble virgin. God is Immanuel in the midst of his people. In the midst of their shame. And he brings grace. And grace itself is shameful, because you can’t pay it back, because you are not in control.

God is no respecter of shame. He does care about sin and the law, but he also has given the remedy. Jesus, who saves His people from their sins.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Reign of God has Drawn Near to You

12813wordle

Biblical Text: Matthew 3:1-12
Full Sermon Draft

I attempted something in this sermon through a couple of methods that I think most people would say don’t. John the Baptist is an enigmatic figure. He was a huge deal to those in Jesus’ time. The whole “there is not one greater born of woman” phrase that Jesus employs. John had disciples that lasted long in to the first century. The apostles in Acts run into them as “ones who’ve had the baptism of John” but didn’t know about Jesus. Even in secular literature John gets more time. Josephus records the extent of the Baptist’s following which was enough to cause Herod to come after him. But in our day and for most of Christian history John is just an almost forgotten per-cursor. He would have liked that. “He must become greater, I must become less.” But preaching from John to me has renewed vitality. My intention was to create the picture of how we and those people streaming out to John are very close, probably closer than we have been for at least 500 years if not 2000. Want to hear more of that take a listen.

The pay-off is that the proclamation of John can be the direct proclamation to the people of God today. Not that it couldn’t have been 50 or 100 years ago, but I think, if I was successful with the first part, then the second part becomes one of those “ah-ha” type experiences. That is what was so powerful, combined with oh, and it applies to me in some very specific way.

So, my guess is this either “works” or you wonder what the heck I’m talking about. Either I was successful in casting “in those days” over today, or the proclamation falls on deaf ears.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download