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You Are a Slave! - Reformation Day (observed)

10/30/2011

Revelation 14:6-7
Romans 3:19-28
John 8:31-36

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

You are a slave. A slave to sin. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been set free from sin by the blood of Christ. Sin is still in you. It still rears its ugly head. So in that sense you are a slave to it, until that final day when having abided in Christ Jesus, you will be truly released from this slavery.

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Everyone's a Lawyer -- 18th Sunday after Trinity

10/23/2011

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Deuteronomy 10:12-21
1 Corinthians 1:1-9
Matthew 22:34-46

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

Way back on Mt. Sinai who gave Moses the Law? God did. Now in Jesus’ day, a lawyer, an expert of the Law, in what God said, tested our Lord. “What’s the greatest Law?” he said. Our Lord answers with flying colours, “You will love Lord your God completely.” And then He adds to it, “And a second is like it, ‘You will love your neighbour as yourself.” He gives out the Law just as He did on Mt. Sinai. And all of what Moses said and everything of what the prophets said hangs on, depends on, these two laws of love.

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Shame, Shame Go Away - 17th Sunday after Trinity

10/19/2011

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Proverbs 25:6-14
Ephesians 4:1-6
Luke 14:1-11
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

“I have never been so embarrassed, so ashamed.” Whether it was your own mistake, your own gaff, or what someone else did to you, you’ve all felt that embarrassment, that shame. It makes you never want to go back there. In truth, if the shame is great enough the only way to be able to go back is to have the shame removed from you. Of course, these things that shame us tend to eventually blow over. But the one who was shamed continues to live with it. While others may forget, they do not. For they have been sullied by it, even if original cause of their shame was their own fault, they have been effected and shamed by their mistreatment at the hands of the community they were a part of. For many that causes bitterness to take root in them. Resentment. And they become reluctant to show their face in public. They become reclusive, cut off from everyone. For that’s what shame is. It is the effect of sin on the communities you are a part of. And no matter whose fault it is, the shame effects your standing in that community.

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Man Dies, Leaving Mother Destitute - 16th Sunday after Trinity

10/9/2011

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1 Kings 17:17-24
Ephesians 3:13-21
Luke 7:11-17

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

Two historical accounts confront us today. The bare details of the stories are strikingly similar. A son, an only son of his mother, dies. A woman in great distress, not merely because of the death and natural sorrow that accompanies it, but because no one is left to take care of these widows in their old age. This death means destitution. Poverty. Bleak prospects. There is no hope left. Just the dingy greyness, emptiness of death, and the depression that follows for the survivors. All joie de vie is gone. Their purpose, hope, even their desire to get out of bed each day, gone. For these women their lives are over. They are alive but they have become the living dead, caught in hopelessness and despair without hope for the future.

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Do Birds Worry? - 15th Sunday after Trinity

10/2/2011

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1 Kings 17:8-16
Galatians 5:25-6:10
Matthew 6:24-34

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

Consider the birds of the air. They don’t engage in the vocations that put food on our tables, farming, transportation, grocery stores, markets, etc. Yet God provides for them. God provides because God is able. And He provides for us too because He is able. He provides for us through the sun and rain He sends, as well as through the jobs of all those souls whose work goes into your food getting to your table. In today's Gospel Our Lord is not telling you to be like a bird. To simply be a hunter-gatherer, or to trust Him in such a way that you don’t use your head to do work you are given to do, so that you don’t play your part. What He is saying is: don’t worry. Can you add any more time to your life by worrying? No. Does worrying actually give you anything other than a headache and a way to stay up all night without the aid of coffee? Worrying merely makes you miserable.

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You Are a Slave! - Reformation Day (observed)

Everyone's a Lawyer -- 18th Sunday after Trinity

Shame, Shame Go Away - 17th Sunday after Trinity

Man Dies, Leaving Mother Destitute - 16th Sunday after Trinity

Do Birds Worry? - 15th Sunday after Trinity

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