Church Year
Palm Sunday: A Clarion Call, Not a Reenactment – Br. Curtis Almquist
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Br. Curtis Almquist
Palm Sunday
Philippians 2:5-11
John 12:20-33
When I was a young boy, I hated lima beans.
Now I love lima beans.
But I have always loved my mother more than I love lima beans.
Strong words – hate, love – used hyperbolically to catch our attention and to make a point. We do this a lot with English. And it also happens in the Greek of the New Testament. So we need to interpret here Jesus’ words about hate truthfully but not literally. He says, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Jesus is not a hater. Here in the Gospel according to John, Jesus has only just said, “For God so loves the world . . .” And that includes you, and me, and everyone-everything else to which God has given life, God loves.[1] Eternally. God is love.[2] Read More
Born Anew – Br. Luke Ditewig
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Br. Luke Ditewig
The Second Sunday in Lent
Genesis 12:1-4a
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17
A woman and her young daughter move into a French village and open a chocolate shop. The mayor urges residents to keep away and not each chocolate because it is Lent. With kindness, generosity, radical welcome, listening presence, and great chocolate, the woman slowly ushers healing into many people and relationships, ultimately the mayor and town. The 2000 film Chocolat starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp tells this story.
The mayor was convinced he knew what was right and good and that he acted out of duty. Yet fasting was distorted into a legalistic rigidity and a sense of earning God’s favor. He treated his community and himself with restriction and condemnation. Many of us have received an image of God who is a harsh and stern authority with a pointing finger demanding an apology. Lent with fasting and kneeling on marble might trigger that image. Read More
John’s Unpleasant Message – Br. David Vryhof
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Br. David Vryhof
In recent years, a prepackaged Advent series called “The Advent Conspiracy” has become quite popular in certain churches. It has the laudable goal of focusing on what’s really important in our preparation for Christmas by encouraging people to buy less, to give more to charity, and to spend time with their families rather than just spending money on them. The program seems commendable but there’s something that seems to be missing.
I wonder what John the Baptist would have thought about it. John pops up everywhere in our Advent readings and with good reason. He was the most popular preacher of his generation. Jesus claims that “among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist” (Matthew 11:11). People walked for miles just to see him, drawn by his unusual lifestyle and his dramatic, even theatrical, preaching. He was a sight to see, for sure, but they also found their hearts captured by his message. Hordes of them found themselves welling up with tears, telling God how sorry they were, and lining up to be cleansed in the River Jordan. Even those who came just to see the spectacle went home drenched with baptismal waters. Read More
Jesus Reigns – Br. Luke Ditewig
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Br. Luke Ditewig
Christ the King: The Last Sunday after Pentecost
Woe to shepherds who destroy and scatter my people! Through Jeremiah, God is upset at corrupt kings in Israel and tells of Jesus to come as a good king, a righteous Branch, who will be wise, who will save and bring safety. Not long after this King Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. He took most of the city captive and moved them far away to exile in Babylon.
As under Pharoah in Egypt and under Caesar of the Roman empire in the time of Jesus and the early church, the biblical story is of people under the oppression from both inside and outside. We see this in the world and experience it more now with our wannabe king as they seize power and wealth and oppress the vulnerable.
For the Colossians, the image of Caesar – understood to be the son of God – was everywhere, and imperial power kept the peace by military force including through crucifixion.[1] In his letter, Paul gives not a simple poem but rather subverting empire by saying Jesus, not Caesar, is the image of God and Lord of all.[2] Read More
Mary, Mother of the Church – Br. Keith Nelson
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Br. Keith Nelson
The Dormition of Saint Mary the Virgin, Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ
By the time of Jesus, the bodily resurrection of the faithful at a future time appointed by God had become a significant strand in Jewish belief, especially among the Pharisees, but also among the common people. For example, after the death of Lazarus in John’s gospel, Jesus tells Martha of Bethany, “Your brother will rise again,” to which she replies, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” In addition to this pre-Christian belief in a general resurrection, there were prominent figures both within and outside of Scripture who were said to have been “taken up” into God’s presence. The prophet Elijah is the most explicit example, taken up to God at the end of his life by angels in a fiery chariot. In the case of Moses, there is room for mystery: In the book Deuteronomy, Moses “was buried in the a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor, but no one knows his burial place to this day.” A non-canonical, first-century Jewish text, the Assumption of Moses, seems to imply that Moses was taken up by God after his death, but then asserts that, like him, there would likewise be a future assumption of the entire people of Israel, following the example of Moses. Moses becomes a representative figure: in his total self-offering to God, the people of Israel have found, and will further find, the consummation of God’s purpose for them.
Speaking the Language of God – Br. James Koester
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Br. James Koester
The Day of Pentecost
I must confess that I have always been envious of those who are able to acquire another language. I have always struggled to learn first French, then Latin, before being completely defeated by Greek.
As a child my parents enrolled me in private French lessons, but when French became available at school, it was like starting over again. Each year was the same. I struggled all year to learn a few basics. I’d scrape by with a pass at the end of the school year and then forget everything over the summer. Each Fall I would have start again from square one. I finally dropped both French and Latin in high school. In the first year of seminary, I enrolled in New Testament Greek. Early in the term the professor arranged for us all to take a language aptitude test. My years of struggling to learn another language all came together with that test. Finally, everything made sense.
This Palm Sunday – Br. Lain Wilson
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Palm Sunday
This morning, we enter with Jesus in triumph into Jerusalem, a king coming to his city. This morning, we join with a great crowd, bearing palm branches, shouting “Hosanna”—crying in jubilation and praise to our savior.
This morning, too, we hear from Jesus that this triumph is only the beginning, the first stage on the road to his death, the “hour” of his glorification.
This day, from our earliest evidence about its celebration, has always had this dual character of triumph and passion, of joy and sorrow. These aren’t unrelated strands but are inextricably intertwined aspects of what it means for Jesus to save. Writing in the mid-1950s, French Jesuit Paul Doncoeur noted: “The one we acclaim today is the one who will die, because his very death is his victory. . . . He who wins loses; he who loses wins—this is the undercurrent of the gospels.”[1]
Palm Sunday is jubilant and celebratory and triumphant, not in spite of but because of everything that will come after. In the long walk through this Holy Week—in fear and anguish and tears and betrayal and suffering and agony and death; that is, in all that Jesus will experience in his final week—in all this is found the victory of which today is only the foretaste. Jesus’s “obedience to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil 2:8), this “stumbling block” and “foolishness” of “Christ crucified” that Paul preached—all this that Jesus will accomplish by week’s end, we today, on this Palm Sunday, anticipate, knowing that it will come.
If Only – Br. Lain Wilson
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
“If only.”
This past week, I recalled a Thanksgiving from almost a decade ago. I had messed up at work and ended up stuck with a pile of papers over the holiday. Not knowing how to admit fault and ask for help, I was caught in a cycle of self-blame, wishing for a way out.
“If only I were somewhere else,” I thought to myself, “If only I were doing something else.”
I’m sure each of you has had your own “if only.” A desire for escape, for something new, for greener grass. A looking ahead and hope for a better future.
I can’t help but think there’s an “if only” lying behind our readings from the psalms and Isaiah this evening. Both foretell an era of justice and prosperity, of deliverance and redemption, of wolves living alongside lambs. If only we had a righteous king.
Both passages have traditionally been interpreted as referring to the coming messiah. Who else could be this textbook-perfect? Read More
Marking Time – Br. Lain Wilson
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
All Souls: All the Faithful Departed
When I was ten years old, we gave my grandmother a calendar with family pictures. I think that’s a fairly standard Christmas gift for a grandmother. She hung it up in her closet . . . and it continued to hang there for the next twenty-seven years. On it, year by year, she noted major life events: vacations, births, marriages, deaths. Long after it ceased being useful as a way of noting the day of the week, the calendar provided a different way of marking time, through the vital rhythms of human lives and relationships. It was an icon of sorts, making present all those people who surrounded her.
On this day of All Souls, we are called especially to remember and make present all those who have surrounded us and who now rest in death. We celebrated at the feast of All Saints yesterday those champions of faith whose closeness to God makes them radiate God’s love, as surely as their icons in glass in the Chapel windows shine with the morning sunlight. Today we commemorate those whose light may be known only to us and to God. We will shortly hear many of their names; many, many—uncountably more—rest in our hearts. We will hear their names, with our ears or in our hearts, and make them present. Read More
The Last Breath of Jesus – Br. Keith Nelson
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Good Friday
John 18:1-19:42
lanterns, torches, & weapons
a sword
a severed ear
a charcoal fire
a crown of thorns
a purple robe
a cross
an inscription
an untorn tunic
a jar of sour wine
a sponge
a branch of hyssop
a spear
These are the non-human witnesses of the passion of Jesus Christ. Most are what a materialist culture would call inanimate objects, witnesses without agency, intention, or sentience. But these disparate, created things have been joined in the devotional mind of Christians over the centuries under the banner Arma Christi – the weapons of Christ, the things he uses to conquer death. They are listed in litanies, depicted on altarpieces, and cluster around roadside shrines. The cross is given the central place, “an instrument of shameful death” transformed by Christ’s passion and resurrection “to be for us the means of life.”
In a lesser fashion, these other created things also share participation in Christ. Drawn into the purposes of the prince of Peace, these so-called “weapons” become by his passion implements of peace and Life. By their strange constellation in the same place, at the same time around Jesus of Nazareth, their Maker has conspired to set us free. Read More