Tag: God with Us

Where’s My Sign?

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Biblical Text: Matthew 11:2-15

This is one of my favorite texts in the lectionary. I say that primarily because it is a big fat pitch that sets a preacher up to hit one out of the park. Not every text is that. There are hard texts that slapping a single is good. There are texts that the subject matter might be important, but just not that “sexy”. Again, the every Sunday preacher slaps a single, or maybe you can steal a double if you hustle. And then there are texts about why God doesn’t just solve all our problems. There are texts that are responses to “why?” There are texts that get right to the foot of the cross.

This one was helped by an odd occurrence in life. Someone stole a sign at church. It was a sign I had out in the front of the church on the main road inviting people in for Morning Prayer (Tuesday – Friday). Someone just walked away with it. That’s the introduction to the sermon.

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Future Opportunity

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Biblical Text: Genesis 1:1-5

This sermon is a bit more philosophical that I typically get. It is also leaning of a work of systematic or dogmatic theology I’ve been reading by the Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson. Classic theology is build around what in Latin are loci. In English it is much less impressive, merely subjects of focus. And the classic first loci is God.

There is a blatant problem with that. Absent revelation we can know nothing about God. Most everybody would disagree with that. That is the inspiration for every rational and forced mystic quest for God. It is the thinking behind “seeking”. And all those quests seem to have the same goal, to get under or behind or beneath our existence to the eternal timeless reality. But the God of revelation is not timeless; He is the creator of time.

This sermon invites us not to be driven by fear into seeking some unchanging reality, but to hear Jesus is risen as the invitation to a way through time, through God’s good creation from alpha to omega.

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