Last week I was at our church’s Annual Conference. All the pastors and lay members from all the United Methodist churches in Oregon and Idaho got together in Salem to worship together, to discuss important issues, to learn, and to prepare the church for the future. This year’s theme was Boldly Making Disciples of Jesus Christ: Embracing Change.

Now, some of you may be wondering what Embracing Change has to do with church. After all, many of us have been taught that God is never-changing, age to age the same. And if we believe that, we may also believe that the church should be never-changing, age to age the same — like we sing in the Gloria Patri: as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.

The great prophet Elijah shows up in town and finds a woman, a widow. He asks her for a drink of water, and she get’s it for him. Then he asks her for some bread, and she tells him that she has none to give him. She and her son have only enough flour and oil to make one last meal. She’s preparing to make it now, and then she and her son will die.

Now, any normal person who heard a sad story like that would say, “I’m sorry for bothering you,” or “Is there anything I can do to help you?” But not Elijah. No, Elijah, after hearing that the widow and her son are about to starve to death, says to her, “Go and do as you have said; but first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterwards make something for yourself and your son.” Now, that is some incredible gall.

I Still Have Many Things to Say

Trinity Sunday
John 16:12-15

The passage from the Gospel of John today is part of what we call the farewell discourse. For three full chapters during the last supper, Jesus goes on telling the disciples everything they are going to need to know once he is gone. It’s in the style of a deathbed testimonial, where the hero gives all of his best advice before he dies.

Toward the end of this long speech, Jesus says to his disciples, “I still have many things to say to you.” There are still many things that Jesus has to teach them, many things they have yet to learn. And in some sense, this is Jesus’ last chance to get all those points across to them.

“I still have many things to say to you. But,” Jesus says, “you cannot bear them now.”

The story of Pentecost is one of those stories in the Bible that we’ve heard so many times that sometimes it loses it’s impact. It has become familiar. So we read things like, “There was an incredible noise that came from heaven, and it sounded like a hurricane.” And we respond, “Oh really.” And we hear things like: “Then something that looked like fire came flying into the house, and it split up into a bunch of little pieces and was floating right above everyone’s heads.” And we respond, “Well, that doesn’t seem so unreasonable.” We read things like, “Then they all started speaking fluently in languages that they had never studied.” And we think nothing of it.

Paul & Silas

The Seventh Sunday of Easter
Acts 16:16-34

The more I study this story about Paul and Silas, the more confused I get. The version of it that I’ve been carrying around in my head for the last several years has Paul and Silas healing a demon-possessed woman, then being thrown in prison because of their missionary activities, then escaping when an earthquake breaks down the door. But in point of fact, none of the things I remember are true. Paul and Silas don’t heal a demon-possessed woman, they aren’t thrown in jail for missionary activities, and they do not escape as the result of an earthquake. So what really does happen in this story?

Peace I Leave With You

The Sixth Sunday of Easter
John 14:23-29

Jesus is about to leave his disciples. He had raised them up from nothing. They hadn’t been scholars or priests; they were fishermen and farmers and tax collectors. But he had called them, and they became disciples. They had followed him across the country, listening to his words, learning his ways. They had become a community, and they had a mission.

But now he was leaving. And it hadn’t been long: at most three years, but perhaps only one. Not very long to get acquainted. Not very long to get things started. Not very long at all. And now, before things had hardly begun, Jesus was going to leave them behind, go off to pursue bigger and better things.

Who Was I That I Could Hinder God?

The Fifth Sunday of Easter
Acts 11:1-18

There is a debate raging in the Jerusalem church. It’s only a short time after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension into heaven, but already the political lines are being drawn. Already the sides are being taken. Already they are preparing for a fight.

On the one side is the leader of the Jerusalem church, Jesus’ own brother, James, known to later generations as St. James the Just. James represents the conservative faction. He wants to preserve the traditions that God’s people have been upholding for generations upon generations. He is interested in staying faithful to the message of the bible and doesn’t want to monkey around with the tradition just because of some ephemeral changes in the culture.

Tribulation

The Fourth Sunday of Easter
Revelation 7:9-17

The Book of Revelation is born out of suffering. It is written in a time of great persecution, oppression, and tribulation. Christians were considered enemies of the state simply for being Christian. And the punishment for being a Christian was death. But that wasn’t all. It wasn’t as if the Roman soldiers just went around and rounded up a bunch of Christians and killed them. No, they gave people a chance to repent. You had to confess to being a Christian in order to be executed. So if you were taken into custody, you had a very stark choice. On the one hand, you could simply go make a offering in the temple dedicated to the Roman emperor, one quick acknowledgement that the emperor was a god, and you would be released. Or, on the other hand, you could refuse to make an offering to the emperor, and undergo more torture, and then refuse again, and admit that you were Christian, and then be tortured some more, and then be executed in whatever grotesque way the Roman authorities dreamed up. Deny Christ and be set free. Witness to Christ and be tortured and killed. A very stark choice.

Breakfast on the Beach

The Third Sunday of Easter
John 21:1-19

Last week we talked a bit about the passage in John that comes right before this one. Perhaps you remember it. It’s the evening of the first Easter, and the disciples are locked away in the house in Jerusalem because they are afraid. Jesus appears and tells them that it is time to let their fear go and get out there and do what they have been called to do: be apostles. “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you. Get out there and be apostles!” A week passes, and the disciples are still locked up in that same house in Jerusalem, still too afraid to go out. And Jesus appears to them again, saying again that it is time for them to get out of the locked room and do what they were meant to do. They have been sent out, and they need to get going. That’s what it means to be an apostle, to be sent out. So why are they still locked away.

Breathing Peace

The Second Sunday of Easter
John 20:19-23

It’s still Easter. The disciples have gotten the news that Jesus is risen. They’ve heard the reports from the empty tomb. They’ve heard Mary Magdalene’s story of how she saw the risen Lord. And now, with the sun low in the western sky, they are not out proclaiming the good news, they are not spreading the word that Jesus is risen. No, as evening falls they are hidden away in some undisclosed location, with the doors closed, locked, and barred. And why are they cowering away in some dark corner? Because they are afraid of the Jews.

Apostola Apostolorum

Easter Sunday
John 20:1-18

Mary Magdalene. You have undoubtedly heard of her. If not from the bible stories about her, at least from Dan Brown. In his best-seller, The Da Vinci Code, Mary is portrayed as the wife of Jesus, the mother of his secret child, the holy grail because she was the vessel for his holy bloodline, a secret that has been guarded through the centuries by a series of secret societies. This novel captivated the world and spurred all kinds of conversations about Mary, her role among the early disciples, and the sacred feminine. Of course, we have since learned that Dan Brown was rather loose with the things he portrayed as fact, preferring to tell a good story. That is, after all, what any good novelist would do.

Jesus is anointed with costly perfume by a woman. It happens in all four of the gospels, but the details are different in each gospel. Three have the anointing happening at Bethany, one somewhere else. Two have it at the house of Simon the leper, one at the house of Simon the Pharisee, and one at the house of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Three have an unnamed woman who anoints Jesus, one has Mary of Bethany. Two have Jesus’ head being anointed and two have his feet being anointed. Each of the stories is a little different.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is one of the most familiar stories in the bible, and for many it is one of the favorites. Most of us have heard it read and heard it interpreted many times. One son asks for his share of the inheritance early. After he blows everything, he comes crawling back asking to be hired on in his father’s household. But the father instead welcomes him as a son and throws a huge party. The older son is upset that even though he has been good, he’s never gotten a party. And as we’ve all heard, the father represents God, who is always ready to welcome back a wayward sinner into the fold and rejoices over the lost who is found, whereas those who are already in the church often grumble that latecomers to the faith still get all the goodies even though they have wasted most of their lives.

But we’ve all heard that sermon before.

During this season of Lent think a lot about wilderness. The forty days of Lent parallel the forty days that Jesus spent being tested in the wilderness and the forty years that the Hebrew people spent in the wilderness after being liberated from slavery in Egypt, but before entering the Promised Land. In his letter to Church in Corinth, the Apostle Paul uses the story of the wilderness wandering of the Hebrews in order to make a very interesting point to his contemporary Christians.

Abraham is quite an interesting character. Chances are you’ve heard of him before. Father Abraham. He is an important figure in three of the world’s major religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He’s considered by some to be the world’s first monotheist, the first person to consider that there might be only one God. He is the father of Isaac and Ishmael, the grandfather of Jacob and Esau. Most of us know the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac, how Abraham was willing to offer up even his own beloved son, if that’s what God demanded. Many of us have heard how Abraham was called by God to leave his homeland and start a new nation that would become Israel. Some of us know the story of how Abraham pleaded with God to spare the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah from destruction. But I’ll bet that very few of us know the story we heard today, the story of Abram and the Smoking Fire Pot.

Jesus, after his baptism, is led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness. He spends forty days and forty nights out there in the desert. It’s reminiscent of the forty days that Noah and his family spent on the ark, and of the forty years that the Hebrew people spent in the wilderness. During the whole forty days, Jesus doesn’t eat anything. At the end of the time, we are told, he was famished. And that is the moment when the devil appears to test him.

Beneath the Veil

Transfiguration Sunday
Exodus 34:29-35
Luke 9:28-36

Back when Melissa and I were first married, after we had bought our first little house, we used to spend quite a bit of time watching various home repair and decorating shows. And one of our favorites was a show on TLC called Trading Spaces. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s how it goes: Usually there will be two sets of neighbors who have houses next to each other. They sign up to be on the show together. Then the Trading Spaces team comes in: designers, carpenters, other professionals. For 48 hours the neighbors switch houses and work with their assigned designers to redecorate one or two rooms for their neighbors. The trick is that the neighbors have no idea and no say into what’s going on in their own house. They have to trust that their neighbors and the Trading Spaces designers will make good choices and give them a new room that they will like.

There they are in the boat after a long night’s work. The best fishing on the Lake of Galilee was always done at night. It was rather hard work. The hours were obviously terrible. The taxes were high, and the permits were expensive. It was not the most honorable of professions. But there they are, by the side of the lake. They’ve been fishing all night, as they do every night. But on this night, they haven’t caught anything. Hours spent lowering the nets and pulling them in, but nothing to show for it. And now they have to spend the several hours it will take to clean out the nets from all the things that have been caught in them.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the presence of these witnesses, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony…. Wait a minute… that can’t be right. I guess I heard Connie reading from 1 Corinthians 13 and I just got a little carried away. We hardly ever read that text at a regular church service, but it seems like whenever there is a wedding, this is the text that they choose. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful…. Love never ends.” It sounds so romantic, doesn’t it? Just reading through it I can almost hear Pachelbel’s Canon in D playing in my head, which, by the way, is not actually a canon at all — it’s a ground bass — but that is another story. 1 Corinthians 13, like Pachelbel’s Canon, is just one of the those things that we expect to hear at weddings.

There are more copies of the Bible in the world than any other book. Every bookstore has several editions. You can find it at the library. When you stay at a hotel, you’ll find a copy right there in the nightstand, just in case you want to pick it up and read. Most homes have at least one copy of the bible, even if it never gets read. There are study bibles, gift bibles, family bibles, men’s bibles, women’s bibles, children’s bibles, picture bibles. There are bibles in just about every imaginable language, and in most languages there are several different translations to choose from. And even if you can’t get your hands on a book, there are hundreds of versions of the bible freely available on the internet. Just about wherever you are, if you want to, you can easily get access to a bible. They are everywhere. You can just pick one up and read.