Spirit and Truth

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was John 4:3:26:

Today’s gospel passage isn’t the one normally assigned for today, although it could be, because people coming to worship the Christ child is an important element of the Christmas story, as we will hear about next week when we talk about the arrival of the magi, or the wise men from the east. Worship of Jesus also plays an important part after the resurrection. But, we are talking about the woman at the well, or Jesus encounter with a Samaritan woman, because way back in February, which seems like a decade ago, when the Ark held their Mardi Gras fundraiser, my donation was to allow the winning bidder to pick any piece of scripture for me to preach on. Now, I was supposed to have given this message way back in the summer, but with all the changes this year, that didn’t happen, and as I said, I thought talking about worship after Christmas was appropriate. And so that is why we are looking at this passage for today.

As was said in the introduction, after Jesus encounters Nicodemus, a named man, a prominent official, and a Jew, and that will become important in a moment, we are told that Jesus is then going back to Galilee, which is in the north, but to get there, John says, he “had to go through Samaria.” Now it could be that he had to do this because that was the easiest way to get back to Galilee. But, in John, when something has to be done, it normally implies that it is task that God is requiring. So, it’s possible that Jesus has to go through Samaria in order for this encounter to take place. Now when we hear the word Samaritan today, most of us probably think about the parable of the Good Samaritan. In that story the Samaritan comes off as the moral hero, as Jesus says he is the neighbor to the man who was beaten and left on the side of the road. And so we have then this association with Samaritans as being a good thing. They are positioned high in the moral order. They have virtue. But that was certainly not how they were seen by Jews of the time, and to understand that story, and this story, we have to understand how despised the Samaritans were. To be a Samaritan was to be impure otherness.

Heart of Power

This was my message for Pentecost Sunday. The text was Acts 2:1-21:

I have to say that I think Peter’s response in the Pentecost story that the disciples are not drunk as some suppose, because it’s only 9 am is one of my favorite lines of scripture. The way he says it, means we could possibly see him saying, “now if it was three or four, maybe” and thank goodness no one had yet come up with the phrase “it’s five o’clock somewhere.” And the reason why people believe they might be drunk is that many pagan groups, especially mystery cults, used alcohol or other drugs in order to bring about ecstatic or altered states, and so the disciples could certainly be mistaken for that. But what I want to focus on today, at least to start, is the line that begins today’s passage: “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” It’s not quite clear if this is just the disciples, including Matthias who was just added to the 12, along with some of the women with them, or the 120 who were followers at the time, although since they are in a house together, it’s probably the smaller number. But there they are all together, and of course this year at Pentecost we are not altogether. We’re not seeing people in wearing red, or singing together the songs of the Spirit. But, like the disciples we sit and wait.

At Easter I talked about living in a liminal time or a liminal space, the in between between what was and what has not yet been. That’s where the disciples found themselves after the crucifixion, in the in-between, and even after they had encountered the risen Christ they were still really in that liminal space because they didn’t know what was going to happen, where the movement was going, what they were going to become. Instead they were still receiving instructions from Jesus and he tells them to stay in Jerusalem, and tells them that soon they will receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which originally had been promised by John the Baptist, at that when the Spirit came upon them they would receive power, and it’s a lot more fun to do that when you can shout power back at me, and they would take that baptism of the Spirit and the power they had received, they would be Jesus’ “witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” And so they remain in Jerusalem and are there for the festival of weeks, which was a spring harvest festival that took place 50 days after Passover, and thus was also called Pentecost, pente being 50. But here’s where things changed for them, and ended their in-between time.

Jesus the Prophet

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Luke 4:14-24:

Today we begin a new sermon series that will take us through the next three weeks seeking to answer the question who is Jesus? We are doing this because I received several questions about Jesus when I asked for recommendations for sermon topics, but my caveat is that I am not going to be able to entirely encapsulate who Jesus is in only three weeks. In fact, it might be said that every single worship service we are seeking to understand a different element of Jesus and who he is for us, what he means for us, and how we are to live differently because of that. But I decided to try and tackle answering the question of who is Jesus by looking at the three different offices, or roles, that Jesus is said to hold, and those are prophet, priest and king. These are historic roles that have been assigned to Christ going all the way back to the earliest days of the church as they sought to understand Jesus and to give some context to his ministry and message. This is not about Jesus’ nature, but about his functions, and these are not hard and fast offices as there is overlap between the three, but we are going to take each office in kind and today we are going to look at Jesus as prophet.

Now of the three offices, prophet is probably the one that is least covered and perhaps even the least understood. Rev. Richard Rohr, is a Franciscan priest who although known around the world lives here in Albuquerque, says that he has seen lots of statues and stained glass to Christ the King and even Christ the Priest, as well as accompanying celebrations, and we will celebrate Christ the King Sunday, which is the last Sunday of the Christian year before Advent begins, in three weeks. But, he said, he has never seen a celebration or a statue or a stained-glass window to Christ the Prophet, and that, he says, means something’s out of balance. This was even true of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism who, although he said that his preachers should preach Jesus in all his offices, prophet, priest and King, but actually said very little about Jesus as a Prophet. But when we don’t see Jesus as a prophet, it means not only are we not hearing Jesus’ words, or understanding his message with the weight of prophecy, but it also means that we are missing an extremely crucial piece of information about how the early church understood Jesus and his ministry, which was as that of a prophet, but not just any prophet, but of the prophet, and I’ll explain what that means in just a moment.