Psalm 16, 1 Peter 1:3-9 Jeff Davidson Sometimes the lectionary suggests passages that don’t seem to make a lot of sense. We’re just a week after Easter. You would expect that we should still be in celebration mode, shouldn’t we? You would think that we should still be shouting “Alleluia!” and rejoicing in the risen…
Category: suffering
YEARNING FOR SUNDAY
John 20:1-18, Romans 6:1-14 Jenn Hosler A Saturday Vignette At the end of the meal, one of us stepped out. Judas was often heading in and out, so I assumed it was something with his duties as the keeper of the common purse. We didn’t think anything of it, I guess, but I wondered a…
THERE WILL BE NO TOMAHAWK MISSILES IN THE KINGDOM OF GOD
Philippians 2:5-11 & Matthew 21:1-11 Micah Bales Our gospel reading this morning is about Jesus’ triumphal entrance into Jerusalem, just days before he would be arrested and executed. Jesus is riding on a donkey, and the people are all around him. There were massive crowds in town for Passover, and Jesus’ arrival in the city…
ARE WE THERE YET?
Matthew 1:18-25 & Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18 Micah Bales It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas. As an American, I have a stereotyped vision of what Christmas ought to look like. It’s a cold, dark, wintry time. We’re bundled up, rushing from our warm houses to gathering places like this one, and back to our…
THERE WE WERE (HERE WE ARE)
Luke 1:46-55, James 5:7-10, Isaiah 35:1-10 Nate Hosler There we were, Jacob and I, sitting in the jurors’ lounge waiting to get called in to wait to see if we will get picked to serve on a jury. Jacob brought a hymnal. I brought a Bible. If we are going to be waiting we might…
JESUS IS LORD. TRUMP IS NOT.
Jeremiah 23:1-6, Luke 1:67-80 Micah Bales I was raised in the Quaker community, so I didn’t grow up with liturgical seasons. My church growing up was actually more “high church” than most Quaker meetings, if you can believe it. We actually did observe the Advent season to some extent. I remember as a kid we…
Continue to Live Your Lives in Him
Nathan Hosler Colossian 2:6-15, Luke 11:1-13 Over the past weeks and, indeed years, it seems that there is has been a near ceaseless string of the notably bad. We often call these notably bad injustices, or perhaps unjust acts. We are now several years into a seeming endless and unfathomably tragic Syrian war. Nigeria and…
FREEDOM or LIBERATED FOR JOY
Luke 9:51-62, Galatians 5:1, 13-26 Nathan Hosler Dietrich Bonhoeffer is known as a theologian who stood up to Hitler and was killed for it. When much of the German church fell in line with (or at least didn’t oppose) this nationalist, racist leader notorious for the Holocaust, Bonhoeffer resisted. He resisted by being a theologian that…
THE LAST ENEMY
Luke 24:1-12, I Corinthians 15:19-26 Nathan Hosler The “original” Easter happened once. This was long before Easter became a holiday and got associated with abnormally colored eggs or abnormal bunnies or abnormally colored chicks or perhaps most abnormal of all—little brightly colored chicks made of marshmallow. Of course the “original” Easter was in fact much…
Prepare the Soil; Wait for Sunshine
Isaiah 55:1-9, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9 Micah Bales One of the biggest reasons that people reject religious faith is this simple question: “Why would a loving God allow terrible things happen to good people?” It’s a tough question to answer. Maybe an impossible one. Yet from the beginning of recorded history, people have been…
Washington City Church of the Brethren 