Spiritual Disciplines: Bible Reading

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 and Mark 11:15-19:

In the season of Lent, it’s fairly typical for people to begin doing things to try and take on practices that they might not do during the rest of the year. That’s true not just for individuals, but it’s also true for congregations. We, for instance, add a prayer of confession in Lent every week, which we normally don’t do, we’ve been doing a breath prayer and receiving communion every week. When I am working on planning worship I do that for several reasons. One of them is simply so that this season is set aside as being different than the other seasons of the year. But, we also do them because they are specific things to help us in the season of Lent, which is a season of repentance and preparation, to connect with God in a different way. 

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, talked about what he called means of grace. Things that conveyed God’s loving action to us to create, heal, forgive, reconcile and transform human hearts. Among those means of grace are prayer and fasting and serving and worshipping and giving, which we also know as spiritual disciplines, which we have already talked about, or will talk about. These are the things that intentionally help us to not only deepen our faith and our relationship with God, but which help us to understand and celebrate receiving God’s grace. And another one of those means of grace, another spiritual discipline that we are going to address today is what Wesley identified as reading, meditating and studying the scriptures, and I don’t have a bad joke to go with today’s discipline.

Proverbs: Words Like A Sword

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Proverbs 12:13, 18; 13:3;14:17, 29;15:1, 28; 18:6, 21; 19:19; 21:23; 29:22:

I can be an angry driver. Not like cutting people off and then slamming my brakes angry, but calling people not nice names, or responding to things they do. So, for example, the other day a woman decided to make a turn in front of me, when I clearly had the right of way, and so I hit my brakes and honked at her. She in turn hit her horn, as if I was the problem, and flipped me off, and so I returned then gesture and then quickly thought “I hope that’s not a member of the church.” Now the positive side of this is that the girls are learning the rules of driving, because when I say something like “what are you doing idiot?” they will ask me what the other person did, and then I explain how what they did was wrong. Or at least the positive parts is the story I tell myself. Of course, the things I yell at the tv, especially when the Yankees are playing can be even worse. But, the problem is that by saying the things I do, and reacting the way I do, I am also teaching them many negative things as well, and some of the things that we are told not to do in scripture, and in particular in the book of Proverbs, and so we continue in our series on Proverbs looking at anger and the power of the words we use.

Now we may say that sticks and stones may break our bones but words will never hurt us, and even though that rhymes and therefore has the ring of truth to it, we know that it’s not true. That, in fact, words not only can hurt, but they do hurt, and can do considerable damage to us and to others. Words are powerful things, and we should understand this as Christians because we know that words matter, that they can make a difference, that they can change the entire world because we proclaim that Jesus was the word made flesh. The Word made flesh, and so words matter, but how much attention do we really pay to the words we use, the words we say, how we say them, or even the thought process that goes behind them, even if we don’t say them. Do we understand the power they can hold over us and over others?

Proverbs: Wisdom

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Proverbs 1:1-9:

Today we begin a new sermon series looking at the book of Proverbs, which is part of the wisdom literature of the Hebrew scriptures, and I’ll explain exactly what that means in a moment. We are undertaking this series for several reasons. The first is that I track what scripture readings I preach on, and there were some glaring holes in areas of scripture that we had not covered in my four years here. We obviously do fine on the gospels, and other areas of the New Testament, although I’ve been a little light on what are known as the general epistles, or the letters not written by Paul, which we’ll cover at some point, but there were clearly large gaps in the Hebrew scriptures. One of those was in the prophets, which we made some dents in by looking at the 12 minor prophets in the spring, but then there is a lack in the histories, cover books like Kings, Chronicles and Samuel, and then the wisdom literature.

Wisdom literature as we find it in the Bible, is “an umbrella term that encompasses humanity’s quest to understand and organize reality, to find answers to basic existential questions, and to pass that information along from one generation to another.” It seeks to provide both instruction for how we are to live our lives, but also exploration or explanation about the way the world works, especially around the problem of suffering. The books of the wisdom literature include the book of Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, which is also sometimes known as Quoheleth, as the name Ecclesiastes comes from the Latin name of the book, whereas in Hebrew it’s called Quoheleth, and then Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Solomon, a series of love poems that the rabbis said no one should be allowed to read until they were adults, with the age of 35 sometimes thrown around. Sometimes the Psalms are included with the wisdom literature as well, but while there are some Psalms that have the marks of wisdom literature, scholars are not in agreement on which those are, but do say they are not the majority of Psalms, and so are more often not listed as wisdom literature. There are some other books in the apocrypha which are also counted as wisdom literature, but since they are not part of the Protestant cannon of scripture, that is the accepted books, we’re not going to address them now.