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The Following Day: Monday of Holy Week
“On the following day” Read the text: Mark 11:12-19 There are so few opportunities to see the anger of Jesus. We get so lulled by the images of the sweet Jesus, the stained-glass stick figure or the imagined bearded Caucasian with the sheep on his back and the children at his feet, that the Jesus with…
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Not Afraid of the Dark
Banishing the fear that shrouds the light of Christ Lent 4B | John 3:14-21 In the Dark of Night When we pulled up to the bus stop this week in the inky-blue of morning, we found ourselves at the back of the line. A small handful of 3rd or 4th graders rule the stop and…
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For Proclaiming the Gospel, Context is Everything
Between the Lectionary and the world, we’re getting hit with fireballs: the kind of truth that burns and purifies, leaving us naked and lost. I know I wasn’t the only one on Sunday, talking about Jesus in the Temple. A story often referred to as a “cleansing” of the Temple, but more to the point,…
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Tearing Down the Temple
Jesus’s call for the end of faith as we know it Now, Jesus isn’t pushing us toward a churchless faith, a religionless spirituality, or independent devotion. Jesus doesn’t attack the institution because it is an institution but because the leadership of the existing institution is corrupt. Because how they understand scripture is corrupt. Because the…
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The Beasts and the Angels
How Jesus’s time in the wilderness reminds us of our own journey. So this thing we call The Temptation of Jesus isn’t really about temptation, or about the Tempter or about GOD and the problem of evil at all. It’s about experience, creation, and GOD. It is about living in this world that GOD has…
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Make the Kingdom
What Ash Wednesday tells us about what Jesus really wants. It is a time of wrestling with weighty issues of faith and of community; of justice and of the nature of GOD. To wrestle and prepare one another for greater unity. To heal the broken, to care for the weak, to help flip over and…
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Unbinding: emptying the tomb
a Sermon for Lent 5A Text: John 11:1-45 Preventing Death Our story is almost over. Jesus is nearing Jerusalem. And in one final, glorious act, Jesus reveals the very thing He has come to do. A big show of great, inhuman power, in which the whole purpose of the mission is revealed. For us to…