Knowing God, part 2

Chris Kelly – June 17, 2012

Text: Mark 4:25-34

In Mark’s gospel the disciples just don’t get it. They desire to know Jesus. They want to understand his teachings. But they are a little thick. You can detect the frustration in Jesus as he says a little earlier in the chapter we just heard, “Don’t you understand this parable? How will you understand [any of] the parables?” And though he explains it then, and though Mark says in the passage for today that he explained everything all over again in private, it never quite sinks in. Perhaps we are to conclude from this that the disciples are dummies. Or perhaps instead that they are just trying to comprehend something that is really hard.

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Knowing God, part 1

Chris Kelly – June 3, 2012

Text: Isaiah 6:1-8, Psalm 29, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17
Trinity Sunday

Over the past few months people from Faith have been meeting with people from Temple Beth Shalom to talk about worship, theology, scripture, and prayer. The interns at Faith and at the synagogue organized these great discussions. At the last meeting, the topic was personal prayer: when do you pray, what do you pray for, how do you pray, have there been for you any special moments of prayer? In the course of these meetings, people have learned to trust one another, to ask questions openly and without embarrassment and to reveal their own vulnerabilities. So at this, the sixth session, people talked not about how Jews and Christians differ in faith, but about their own personal prayer life.

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Groaning With

Chris Kelly – May 27, 2012

Text: Romans 8:22-27, Acts 2:1-21

This is the season of graduation and commencement. Degrees are conferred, marking the completion of years of intense work and focussed energy. It is the end of something, and congratulations all around. But by calling it commencement, we acknowledge that it is a milestone, or a portal, not a destination. We stop for a moment, we enter new territory, but we are not done traveling.

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Trump

Chris Kelly – May 6, 2012

Text: Acts 8:26-40
Other texts: 1 John 4:7—21

Some Christians like to tell other Christians that the other Christians are not Christian. I have first-hand knowledge of such things. One of my friends, for example, prayed that another friend would become a Christian. Even though the other friend was already a pastor. One of my colleagues at seminary told me that since his fellow-students had not had a born-again experience, they were not Christians, even though they claimed to follow Jesus. In both examples, the ones who were doing the judging felt they not only had a right but had a duty to speak out in judgment. They saw themselves as right—or righteous—defenders of the faith against a weakening of God’s church by pretenders and dangerous loosely-committed hangers-on.

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On the Loose

Chris Kelly – April 8, 2012

Text: Mark 16:1-8

Easter Sunday

Entropy notwithstanding, it seems that the preference of the universe for life is strong. We do not know about how things are on the billions of life-possible planets that scientists think exist in God’s universe, but we do know how things are here. Every surface on this world is covered with life. Forests overtake cleared land in a generation. Flowers grow at bombed sites. The smallest organisms find habitats in the pores of larger ones. Weird plant-like things thrive at the bottom of the ocean, extracting energy from the heat of the center of the earth.

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Palm Passion

Chris Kelly – April 1, 2012

Text: Mark 1:11–11 and Mark 14:1—15:47

Palm Sunday

The gospel of Mark is the shortest of the four Gospels. It is also moves the quickest. It starts fast and ends suddenly. Scenes are jammed together, one thing happens immediately—Mark’s favorite word—immediately after the other. Short and sweet.

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User Manual

Chris Kelly – March 18, 2012

Text: John 3:16
Other texts: John 3:14-21

For many Christians, John 3:16 is the most significant verse in the Bible. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that all who believe in him should not perish but may have eternal life. In one view, this verse answers all questions about the nature and purpose of Jesus and summarizes God’s plan. It is amazing because it bundles in a neat, small package the essence of theological cosmology, telling us all we need to know.

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Remember the Sabbath

Chris Kelly – March 11, 2012

Text: Exodus 20:1-17

God leads the Israelites, already tired of wandering about aimlessly, to Mount Sinai. They have been freed from slavery in Egypt. The redemption they have long hoped for has been accomplished.

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Center of the Universe

Chris Kelly – March 4, 2012

Text: Mark 8:27-38

How misguided Peter seems to us from two thousand years away. We who read this story backward, so to speak, from the ending. We see it through the eyes of tradition, theology, and centuries of learned interpretation. Jesus is not to us as he was to Peter. And we know that Peter often played the fool to Jesus’ wisdom, a tool used by the Gospel writers to reveal a hard truth. Seen this way, with these eyes, history concludes that Peter got it wrong, that he did not see that Jesus was a new kind of messiah.

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Grace from the Get Go

Chris Kelly – February 26, 2012

Text: Genesis 9:8-17

Christians, and especially Protestant Christians, and especially Lutheran Protestants, seem to think they have a lock on grace. We seem to think Luther discovered grace, which was conveyed to us only through Jesus Christ. But this is neither true nor generous. Grace is a characteristic of God. Grace is God’s work. Jesus is an embodiment of grace, but Christianity did not invent grace.

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