Author: Chris Kelly
Chris Kelly
– August 23, 2009
Text: John 6:51-69
Let’s be perfectly clear. As if that were possible.
We would like to be clear about doctrine. How does salvation work, for example? We would like to be clear about morality. What is good behavior and what is not? We would like to be clear about ethics. What is just? We would like to be clear about the future. What will happen to us and when? We struggle, sometimes, to make sense of things. We would like to understand how things work. In light of what we would like, today’s Gospel reading is difficult. That’s what many of the disciples thought. “This teaching is difficult. Who can accept it?” they said.
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Chris Kelly
– August 16, 2009
Text: Luke 17:11-19
A visitor to Faith Kitchen last week asked how we preserve faith in humanity. It was an odd question, since it seems to me that Faith Kitchen is a good example of human activity. People were feeding people. People who might otherwise be crabby with one another were getting along just fine. People who might have crossed to the other side of the road to avoid one another were sitting down to share a meal. This is loving your neighbor and also loving your enemy. It builds faith in humanity. So that’s what I told the visitor.
Read more on The Christian Quest and Getting to the Future…
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Chris Kelly
– July 26, 2009
Texts: John 6:1-21, 2 Kings 4:42-44, Psalm 145:10-19
Last month marked the eighth anniversary of Faith Kitchen [Faith’s community meal program]. On that day eight years ago, three folks from Faith and one guest sat at the table where we now serve Sunday coffee hour. At the next meal a month later, on July 26, there were no guests. But within six months Faith Kitchen was serving 30 people at each meal.
Read more on Food, Glorious Food…
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Chris Kelly
– July 19, 2009
Text: Psalm 23
Other texts: Jeremiah 23:1-6, Mark 6:30-34
George Orwell’s classic novel, Animal Farm, was in the news the past couple of days. That’s because Amazon.com had suddenly and without notice or explanation deleted that book from all the Kindle ebook readers in the world. They also removed another Orwell classic, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both these books deal with how pathological and repressive societies develop. And how easily. (Some people find Amazon’s actions ironic.)
Read more on I Shall Not Want. I Wish….
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Chris Kelly
– July 5, 2009
Text: Mark 6:1-13
There is a kind of story that comes in many versions. They all go something like this:
On a stormy night / [on] a moonless night / a winter night,
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Chris Kelly
– June 28, 2009
Text: Mark 5:21-43
It turns out that if you put a metal plate in a solution of the right kind of atoms, the atoms will naturally form into chain-like molecules call lipids. The lipids like to hang around together, and when they do, they like to stand side by side, with their heads all facing up, like a picket fence. The fence-like thing is floating in water, and sometimes one end of the fence meets the other end, and when that happens, the lipids all form a ring, with their heads outside and their feet inside. These little donut rings are primitive cells. There are a lot of things they cannot do—like they cannot do almost everything. But one thing they are really good at is keeping their insides separate from their outsides. The lipid wall is a great and selective barrier to things that want to come into these proto-cells. Even at this mechanical, not-quite-life stage, barriers—and their enforcement of what is inside versus outside—are fundamental to life.
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Chris Kelly
– June 21, 2009
Text: Mark 4:35-41
It is easy to imagine the expressions on the faces of the disciples. A mix of accusation, incredulity, and terror.
Why did Jesus send them out in this boat if he knew that a storm was brewing? How could he sleep so soundly when the waves were swamping the boats? Maybe they were like the waves described in the psalm that were so big they ascended into the heavens and the troughs so deep that descended into the depths. The disciples, some of them, were fishers. They knew about storms and seas and danger. The knew about drownings and boats lost and people with them.
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Chris Kelly
– June 14, 2009
Text: Mark 4:26–34
Other texts: Ezekiel 17:22–24, 1 Samuel 16:1, 6-12
We just heard two of what are called Jesus’ agricultural parables. It turns out that Jesus wasn’t much of a farmer—he was a city boy—and some of these parables show that. For example, the mustard seed is not the smallest of all seeds, as any gardener would know. But the parables are not instructions about gardening, fortunately. They are ways to help us think about a God who might not think in exactly the same way that we do.
Read more on The Birds and the Trees…
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Chris Kelly
– June 7, 2009
Text: John 3:1-17
Let’s say you want to get to San Francisco. And let’s say you were starting here in Cambridge. Here are some ways you could do that. You could wander around aimlessly, hoping that in time you’d stumble into San Francisco. Probably not going to happen. Or better, you could realize that San Francisco is almost due west of Cambridge, and that if you had a compass you could walk in a straight line from one city to the other. Except you would have to bushwhack, ford streams, cross rugged mountains, and generally have a rough time of it. Or better yet, you could walk on a path already laid out, a path marked on a map and labeled with a sign that said “the way to San Francisco,” a road that without too much bother and in time would get you to where you hoped to go.
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Chris Kelly
– May 24, 2009
Text: Acts 1:15-26
There seem to be some verses missing in the reading today from the Book of Acts.
Here’s how that could be. There is a committee that chooses the readings for each Sunday. On the committee are people from lots of Christian denominations. Sometimes they leave out some verses in the middle of the reading. As they did today. Sometimes they do that because the middle verses are distracting, or include some verses that seem out of place. But I’m convinced that sometimes they do that because the left-out verses give them the creeps.
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