September 1, 2020 

Our lives as Christians begin with the cross. It is central; it is essential; it is the center and core of Christianity. It is because of the cross that Jesus accepts us as we are – with all of our sins, failures, and hang-ups. In our Gospel portion for Sunday, however, our Lord talks of the centrality, essentiality, and permanency of the cross. “If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.”

What does this mean to us in this day and hour? 

It means accepting one another where they are in order that we may patiently and lovingly lead them to where God wants them to be. 

It means to stoop to the feet-washing level of our neighbor’s need in order that we may lift him/her to the glorious heights of God’s loving acceptance. 

It means to identify with humanity about us, irrespective of race, color, or creed – to be truly human. 

It means involvement with the sufferings and sorrows, conflicts and consternations, failures and defeats, of one another. 

It means that we bear one another’s burdens and share in their despair. 

It means that we listen - and then put our lives on the line in loving and sacrificial action to bring justice and dignity and opportunity and validity to every human being within our reach or circle of influence. 

It means that, whenever and wherever possible, we proclaim the blessed Gospel of God’s love and grace through Jesus.

Jesus went to the cross on our behalf. May our Savior and Lord enable us to take up our cross and follow Him.

August 23, 2020

It is probable that Jesus was discouraged over the responses of the many who had heard him preach and who witnessed His miracles. Like people who flock to certain churches today that offer healing, or mesmerize their audiences with mind-blowing antics that are geared to crowd- gathering, there were crowds who pressed in upon Jesus because He could perform the kind of magic that pleased them, fed them, or healed them. They were quite willing to vote Him into office as king if that could be arranged.

Jesus took His most loyal followers aside to question them concerning their attitudes in this matter. He invited them to articulate their feelings toward Him. The larger group of followers that showed some interest in Jesus compared Him to Elijah or John the Baptist or some prophet come back to life. From the inner circle of followers, through the lips of Peter, came a more encouraging confession: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” It was a true confession, probably immature at this point; nevertheless, it was genuine, and Jesus accepted it as such.

May it be our genuine confession, even if it is not fully thought through. As Peter developed in his comprehension of Jesus’ person and purposes, and his own commitment to Him, so we will grow and mature as sons and daughters of God and disciples of Jesus. We stake our lives on that truth of Jesus as Son of the living God that has become obvious to us by way of the cross and His glorious resurrection. And because of this truth, we are God’s forever.

August 16, 2020

“O woman, great is your faith.” (Matthew 15:28a)

Why is God so stubborn? It is a question many of us have entertained at one time or another. There are those times when we have felt that God is downright obstinate and seems to be cold, indifferent, insulated, or unrelated to our aches and agonies. God not only allows us to get into complexities and entanglements we have no intention or desire to get into, but God appears at times to be totally oblivious to our struggles and conflicts. We agree that God is in heaven – lest one be accused of blasphemy or heresy – but there are occasions when God seems to have abdicated our chaotic world.

Why is God so stubborn? Perhaps it is because God loves us too much that God insists on giving us the very best in life. There are times when the only way God has of introducing us to the best is to allow us to prick ourselves on the thorny bushes of this existence, or run amok in its blind allies and dead-end streets, or flail helplessly on its quicksands of disillusionment and disaster. When we desperately long for deliverance, as did the Canaanite woman in our Gospel Lesson for August 16, we have taken the initial step in preparing the way for God to grant the miracle of sufficient grace to bear our afflictions or to live fruitfully and effectively with our problems.

It is not enough that we bring our problems to God. We must bring ourselves to God – yield to God the reins of our lives, place before God all that we have. Then miracles can begin to happen in our lives.

May God pull us out of our swamps of self-pity and depression and teach us how to cope with the struggles and conflicts that we encounter and deal with day by day.

August 9, 2020

“O man of little faith, why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14:31b)

The crowd-gathering religions today, as well as in Jesus’ day, are for the most part satisfied with the spectacular and the fantastic, the walking-on-water, feeding-the-five-thousand, healing the sick, turning-water-into-wine aspects of religion, and there appears to be little relationship between that and the “faith of our fathers, living still, in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword.”

Jesus was in the process of creating and nourishing faith in the disciples, the kind of faith that stirs up the daring within the soul, that goes beyond the limits of what is reasonable and rational, and flirts with the risk of new ventures, that turns its back upon one’s well-laid plans for future security and well-being, and dares to tread the fringe of danger for the benefit of others. It is a vibrant, living, daring, sacrificial faith, a faith that does not burn out, that does not falter when one begins to sink beneath the waters, but lays hold afresh on the proclaimed and dramatized saving love and grace of God and rises again to joy and service.

“We gotta believe” – not in some vague, positive-thinking type of religion, or in a god who titillates us on demand, but in the God of our fathers, our Lord and Christ, who created and redeemed us and made us His own, who provides us with all we need to be what He would have us to be and do what He would have us to do. We must believe and act like it – not only in spite of evidences, but in scorn of consequences.

May God grant us the “faith of our fathers,” that we also “will be true to Thee till death.”

August 2, 2020

Our Gospel Lesson for this week is the feeding of the five thousand (plus women and children). It reveals our Lord’s compassion and concern for the great throngs that followed Him. It also presents to us a tremendous commission. It portrays, on the one hand, the desperate needs of the world. The hungry multitude about Christ represented need, and one does not have to look very far beyond one’s own nose to see that the thing most common to all people is need – of one kind or another. There are hundreds of millions throughout our world today who are in need of the most fundamental elements of physical existence – food, clothing, medicine, shelter, security, freedom. There is within all humanity the need for inner assurance and serenity, for meaning and purpose in life.

On the other hand, the miracle in question portrays the mighty, eternally sufficient provision of God. Our Lord’s first action in the face of the oncoming crowd, was to turn to His disciples as if to lay the responsibility of feeding the crowd on them. “We have here only five loaves, and two fish,” they said to Him. “Bring them here to Me,” said Jesus, and taking the loaves and the fish, “He looked up to heaven, and blessed, and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowd.

Jesus gave these people what they wanted: a miracle to thrill them and bread to fill them. But He who sustained physical life with mere bread was here for the real purpose of giving people eternal life with that Bread which came from heaven, the Son of God Himself. He would have these people and us understand that the provision of God is more than enough to fulfill every need of every man, woman and child, and that He is God himself come to earth to bring that ample, divine provision to needy hearts and lives.

Our Lord has made us a channel of His provision to the needs of people in our world. May He give us the willingness and compassion to meet those needs as best we can through the blessings he gives to us.

July 26, 2020

“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure that somebody hid in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy, he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”

We search for this treasure, always thinking it comes from within us or from the world hidden in some experience we have not yet had. The kingdom of heaven is not obvious; it is hidden and must be uncovered. And then through God’s grace we uncover it! We recognize it as what we have been looking for. We bury it again until we can buy the field and make it our own.

How many of us have had a vision of the kingdom, experienced in a piece of music, an experience, or an intuition, and then spent years jettisoning from our lives what gets in the way of possessing the kingdom so that we can claim it as our own.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls. When he found one very precious pearl, he went and sold all that he owned and bought it.” We are all merchants, and life is about searching for pearls. When by God’s grace we find the pearl of great price, that is, the kingdom of heaven, which is life beyond rivalry that comes from God, we realize our search is over. We have found what we have been looking for and we sell all that we own to buy the precious pearl.

Now we have come to the fifth (of the seven parables in Matthew 13) and the most difficult parable. “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that people threw into the lake and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers but threw away the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

This parable has two parts and the whole thing together is the parable. The first part gives us valuable information on how it will be at the end of this present age. The present age is the age that ends when Jesus returns. At the end of this present age everyone knows that pointing of the finger (meaning: “that one is bad”) is an empty gesture; it no longer works. But we then have no effective way of siphoning off violence through retaliation and revenge; we are like all kinds of fish caught in the same net.

Not only are we fish caught in the same net; we become the people on the shore dividing the fish into categories.

Everyone is pointing the finger and sorting fish into categories of good and evil. In such a world there is no grace, mercy or forgiveness and everyone is polarized. All see themselves as good and their rival as evil and civilization is in crisis. That’s how it will be at the end of the age. In short, it looks a lot like our own world on this day in July, 2020.

This is where the second part of the parable kicks in. Here the angels, stand-ins for what we do to each other, throw the evil ones (who have been separated from the good) into the fiery furnace, while the good (who refrain from separating) are saved.

So, what does this whole parable say about the kingdom of heaven? In the kingdom of heaven there is no separation of good from evil and no longer is their condemnation. Those participating in the kingdom of heaven know God loves us. The parable has twisted on us and we may discover it to mean the exact opposite of what we may have thought it meant.

“’Have you understood all these things?’ Jesus asked. They said to him, ‘Yes.’” Do we think the disciples really did understand? Then Jesus goes on and says if they do understand they will be trained leaders in the kingdom of heaven who bring truth, both old and new, out of their treasure chest to share with the whole community.

What will they be sharing? They will be sharing “Things hidden since the beginning of the world!” (Mt 13:35b)

July 19, 2020

The Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds and Jesus’ explanation makes up our Gospel Lesson for the seventh Sunday of Pentecost. The parable paints a picture of perpetual conflict. The world is a battleground where the forces of good and evil are in constant warfare. There are moments when evil appears to have the upper hand. The atrocities that take place about us cause fright and insecurity. The agony of our own inner beings as we do battle with the rebellious, selfish taints and tendencies of our humanity, leaves us confused and frustrated. We are involved in struggle – fierce, vicious, unabated. The outcome, according to our Lord’sanalogy, is not in question. When the day of harvest arrives, God will intervene and the forces of evil will be defeated.

We long desperately for the day of harvest when evil shall be no more, and we shall know and experience the meaning of ultimate and eternal victory. Jesus does not tell us the “why” of struggle. It may be a necessary part of our redemption. Perhaps this crucible experience, with all of its anguish and agony, is essential to our Christian maturity and development, and there is no other way of learning total surrender to and dependence upon God.

The law of nature, that life is given and enriched through struggle and travail, is no less true in our spiritual lives. It is our task to learn how to exist within this struggle, how to turn failures into successes, how to develop and mature within the throes of conflict and find therein a measure of joy and effectiveness. And it is here, in the midst of daily conflict and struggle, that we are called and equipped to advance the kingdom of God and to contribute to the great harvest God has promised. Our great God will teach us as God taught Paul how to “rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, character, and hope” (Romans 5:3- 4).