At this point in the story, Jesus has become a big deal. These verses we heard today are at the end of chapter 6, but we should remember how the chapter began—with that scene on the hillside, where crowds of people from the nearby villages gathered to see him, to hear him speak. After a […]
Isaac Villegas
Bread from heaven
This week the Bible passage are all about food again, just like last week. The central story this time is the miraculous provision of manna in the desert. God hears the complaints of the people, their growling stomachs, and sends bread. The Psalmist turns the memory into a prayer, a song, a hymn for the […]
Food in due season
The Bible passage we heard make me hungry. They’re all about food. Psalm 145:15, “We look to you, O God, and you give us food in due season.” In 2 Kings 4 we have a very short story about people having enough to eat during a famine: they share barely loaves and freshly harvested grain. […]
Woe to the shepherds
“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the LORD” (Jeremiah 23:1) Jeremiah prophesies God’s condemnation of leaders who forsake their people, shepherds who neglect the flock. The leaders have consolidated their authority with terror, and have driven away the people with abusive power. They manipulate the needs of […]
Toward redemption
“This is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people” (Ephesians 1:14). I remember those summers as a kid when the public library would have their reading challenge. If you read ten books, twenty books, I can’t remember the number, you’d get a voucher for a personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut. […]
Content with weaknesses
“I am content with weaknesses… for whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:10). I have a lot of weaknesses. Spiritual, emotional, physical, relational. A very long list. And I’m sure I’ve got more of them than I know of, others that I haven’t noticed. The weakness on my mind this week […]
Steadfast mercy
“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; God’s mercies never come to an end.” ~ Lamentations 3:22 I remember a crush I had one year in high school. I don’t think we were quite dating, per se. We never had a DTR, one of those conversations to “define the relationship.” But we were together […]
Words without knowledge
“Who is this who darkens my counsel with words without knowledge?” (Job 38:2) That line jumped off the page for me this week, after two months of not having to preach, and now having to stand here and have something to say. I heard the verse as a caution, that speaking, that saying things here […]
Covid 2: We wait
Our passage from Ezekiel opens with a vision, where the prophet is standing in the middle of a valley.He’s in the valley of the shadow of death, that place we heard about last week in Psalm 23. Here, in this vision, God takes Ezekiel to a place of despair, where it looks like all hope […]
Covid 1: With me
The prophet Samuel has gone through a lot at this point in the story. If we rewind a bit, he first told the people that a king would be a bad idea. They didn’t need a king, he said. A king would abuse power. But they got a king anyway, and Samuel anointed him—that was […]
Son of Man, Sophia of God
No lyric has ever stopped a tank. No sermon has ever ended patriarchy, especially a sermon delivered by a man. But here we are, trying again, with some words about a few Scriptures—an invitation to live into new possibilities, a call for change. Because we are in need of reformation, we are in church always in need of reformation, to be renewed and restored. To be healed from the sexism that has plagued the church, that plagues our society, that infects our lives, our relationships.
Wisdom, creator of all things
Wisdom is the architect of all things, the builder of the world, the one who formed creation. That’s how the passage from the Wisdom of Solomon describes this cosmic person, this divine personality, all-powerful and full of benevolence. She pervades and penetrates all things, it says, she is God’s power, the breath of God. In […]
God of our ancestors
In our passage from Exodus, when Moses talks with the burning bush, he asks the fire about its identity, about how to tell others about who this is, what kind of deity could this be. “The God of your ancestors”—that who this is, the voice says to Moses. This weeks begins our two-month series on […]
Epiphanies
The magi see signs in the night sky, celestial revelations, announcing that the long-awaited Jewish king, the Messiah, has been born, and they want to pay their respects. After traveling for months across the desert, the magi, probably from Persia, finally arrive in Jerusalem. Jerusalem because, after all, that’s the kind of place where kings […]
Immanuel
This isn’t just the story of Christmas,
just something we hear during this season,
as we reflect on a few passages;
but the story of the bible, the whole thing, is one long story
of a God who has always been finding ways to be with us,
to draw close to us,
to struggle with us,
to rest with us,
because God likes us.
“Do not fear, O Soil”
In this passage from the book of Joel, we hear God speaking, not to human beings, but to soil and animals. We get to eavesdrop on their conversation, to listen to the sorts of things they talk about, God and the soil, God and the animals, when they chat.
Exiles in prison
If we’re committed to the welfare of this country, to the people around us, to the people exiled from us in prisons, in detention centers—if we find our welfare in their welfare, how do we make sense of the contradictions? The contradiction that to be for the welfare of prisoners involves being against the welfare of the society that builds prisons, a way of life that depends on incarceration. What does it mean for us to be committed to peace, here, in this place where God has put us, when sinister violences hold it all together?
The potter’s wheel
Repentance is how we say yes to God’s vision for our lives—to let go of all the ways we try to be something we are not, to release our grip on visions for life that aren’t good for us, visions that aren’t good for our neighbors, and instead entrust ourselves into God’s care, to trust that God will remake us and our world with the goodness we need. Jeremiah’s prophecy about the potter’s house is a word of judgment, a call to say no to what causes destruction in our lives and in our communities, in order to say yes to God’s goodness, to say yes to God’s grace.
to plant
There’s a tree in my backyard, actually a neighbor’s yard, but it’s branches reach above our house, a canopy of leaves over our backyard. A month ago there was a tree guy doing work on it, cutting away a dead branch that stretched toward our house. I asked him how old he thought the tree was. At least 150 years, he said. I stared at it from my backyard office for the rest of the day, thinking about what it’s seen. In it’s early years, it would have watched as Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation set enslaved people free, free from their Southern masters. Maybe the tree was planted in celebration of that liberation. An oak tree bearing witness to the end of slavery.
Let us argue
This stuff weights me down—for you it could be the situation in Kashmir or all the ice melting in Alaska’s seas, or all of this and more. I feel it in my shoulders, the tightness in my neck. Each body carries weight that pulls at us in different ways. I’ve named public trauma here, but I know each of us, each of you, have very personal traumas and heartaches, intimate anxieties that mess with your head, that affect your day to day life.
The earth shall answer
The Scriptures aren’t so much worried about the salvation of this person or that person, but in a collective future for the people as a whole. God saves a community, a people, God’s people, not just individuals, which means each person’s fate is bound up with all the others, my salvation is bound up with yours, and yours with mine.
Prophecies of exile
Here’s the thing I learned from Amos this week, after reading through his prophecy. There’s so little concern with all the things I’ve obsessed about, as a Christian, for most of my life. God doesn’t waste time with the stuff I’ve always thought about as so important for my life, for my faith—all my conceptions about faithfulness, about what it means to love God, to live according to God’s will.
Lovesick
Jesus doesn’t pray for himself by himself. Instead he prays for his friends in their company. “I am asking on their behalf… protect them from the evil one” (13:9, 15). Jesus is single-hearted, wholly for his disciples, worried about their future, desperate for God to watch over them. Life seems unbearable, unimaginable, without them.
Peace I leave with you
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” Jesus offers these words to his friends on his last night with him. Their evening together began with Jesus, taking the feet of his disciples into his hands, pouring water over each one and scrubbing them clean, then with a towel massaging them dry. As they ate their last supper, Jesus tells them that he loves them, that he will miss them, that he will always be with them, in their hearts, in their love, in their lives together, through the Holy Spirit, the divine comforter, the divine advocate, the presence of God.