5 February 2012

Isaiah 40:21-31
Psalm 147:1-11
1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Mark 1:29-39

29 January 2012

Deuteronomy 18:15-20
Psalm 111
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Mark 1:21-28

OK. I’ll admit it. I’m not all that thrilled with today’s reading from the Gospel according to St. Mark. An exorcism? Really, Mark? Really? How can anyone in this post-modern United States of America relate to an exorcism? I mean it was fun in movies a while back – the spinning heads, the green vomit, the eerie, screechy voices – but come on. And one of the problems I have with some of the Church in Africa is that when we protest their practice of regularly engaging in exorcism rituals – and yes, in Lutheran churches – when we protest, they reply by saying that we are the ones who are hopelessly naïve.

22 January 2012

Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Psalm 62:5-12
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20

Jonah knew what was going to happen. He just knew that if he went to Nineveh and there proclaimed God’s Word – well, he knew that God’s Word always changes everything. Always. Everything. And Jonah wasn’t into change – not one little bit. And even as Jonah spoke the words given to him by God, they were hitting their mark. “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” It didn’t take forty days – Nineveh was overthrown all right and by grace – and almost immediately the people of Nineveh found their way of thinking being changed – and in verses that weren’t in our reading, the King of Nineveh proclaims that all shall turn away from “the violence that is in their hands.”

15 January 2012

1 Samuel 3:1-20
Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18
1 Corinthians 6:12-20
John 1:43-51

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Every now and then someone asks me how I decide what readings people will hear on Sunday. The answer is, I don’t. (If I did, I certainly wouldn’t have chosen the Corinthians reading. Ugh.) In traditions, such as ours, that observe the calendar of the liturgical year, there is something called The Revised Common Lectionary. The Lectionary comprises a three-year cycle of readings that give us a broad sampling from the Hebrew Scriptures, from the Epistles – or church letters – of the New Testament, and the from the four Gospels. In the first year of the cycle, the majority of the Gospel readings come from St. Matthew. The second year – that began a little over six weeks ago – is the year when we hear from St. Mark, and in the third year the readings are taken from St. Luke. That leaves the Gospel according to St. John – readings from this fourth gospel are interspersed in the readings of all three years. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the “synoptic” gospels – synoptic meaning “with the same view” because they tend to be fairly similar to one another in plot and language. Then there’s John’s gospel – a very different sort of gospel and in nearly every sense of the word, different.