Answer Me (Testify to the Mountains)

Biblical Text: Micah 6:1-8

This text is one that is often appropriated for its final verse. And honestly I hate most of those appropriations. They rip it out of its context and turn it into a pure law. You better walk humbly with God, usually meaning adopt my entire ideological program, or let me tell you. But the context is pure Gospel. In seven verses everything that God does for us is placed before us. God calls on the heights and the depths to testify to this. And he calls on Israel to answer him. Which they do, with what I take as true contrition. And that verse that so often gets changed into law in the service of our desires? It is God’s absolution. What do we do? From this day walk rightly.

On a personal note, I love preaching on the Old Testament. Maybe I’m odd, but it always feels so much more present to me. I get it. Of course we Christians read the OT through the NT lens. But to me what the NT represents is largely the OT books of Exodus and Joshua. The rest of the OT is our lives. Where Israel struggled and failed are good lessons for our learning.

The Seed of His Teaching

Biblical Text: Mark 4:26-34

All of Jesus’ parable to some extent are elaborations of the parable of the sower, at least his Kingdom parables. But I feel that is even more the case with the Gospel according to Mark. The Sower and the Soils is Jesus’ picture of the Kingdom in this world. The parables that are part of the text today are refinements or close ups of parts of that parable that answer some natural questions. The early part of this sermon sets that connection because the lectionary jumps right back into the gospel skipping the larger narrative parable.

The questions natural questions that might come up immediately are: 1) to what extent are we responsible for the growth of the seeds? and 2) when the seeds do grow what does it look like? This sermon looks at both those questions through the parables.

Future Opportunity

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.