Scott Anderson1 Samuel 3:1-10 † Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18 † 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 † John 1:43-51
A video form of this meditation can be found here. How do we hear the voice of God? How do we recognize the voice of truth when it speaks? How do we understand what we see with our own eyes, and the truth of it? I suspect this is one of the most challenging aspects of the current moment. As we watch the crescendo of right-wing domestic terrorism, shaped and fueled as it has been by mistruths and lies, spreading into all institutions and corners of society. What hope do we have to hold out for our better angels and a future that is truer and safer and more equitable when our own perspectives are dismissed by those who seem to live in entirely different plausibility structures? And on what basis can we be sure that our perspective is fundamentally better than that of these our current president and his supporters call patriots? While I hold to my own convictions, perhaps more strongly now than ever, I know my own perspectives are sometimes incomplete and flawed. I keep thinking of a viral video I suspect most of us have seen of capitol police officer Eugene Goodman making his way up the capitol steps with dozens of rioters menacing him.[i]
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Scott AndersonGenesis 1:1-5 † Psalm 29 † Acts 19:1-7 † Mark 1:4-11 A video version of this sermon can be found here.
Scott AndersonIsaiah 60:1-6 † Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14 † Ephesians 3:1-12 † Matthew 2:1-12
A video version of this sermon can be found here. It’s not one of our readings for this morning, but recall, if you will, the story in the first chapter of Luke in which the angel Gabriel visits Mary. The angel greets her, calls her favored and says she will bear a son. There’s actually quite a bit of talk—typical of Luke to be sure, but it is striking how much explaining the angel needs to do about this child and his significance, about what he will do and what will be done to him, about the miracle of her relative Elizabeth also pregnant in her old age. And Mary seems to ask, well, a few questions of clarification—how can this be? Wait a minute, what?—before she affirms, “Here I am” and “let it be so.” There’s an interesting question that’s asked of this story: was Mary the chosen one, or was she just the first to say “yes”? Scott Anderson2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16 † Luke 1:46b-55 † Romans 16:25-27 † Luke 1:26-38
A video version of this sermon can be found here. Would it surprise you to know that this story from Second Samuel, this story of the victorious King David, now settled in his reign, now looking to build a permanent temple for God did not actually come together at a time when “the king was settled in his house and the LORD had given him rest from all his enemies around him”? Would it surprise you to know that it came about much later, during captivity in Babylon, when the temple that David’s son Solomon ultimately built for the LORD lay in ruins along with much of the civilization Israel had known at its peak, when the best and the brightest and the most privileged of Israel’s citizens had been forced to resettle as refugees in a foreign land? Would it surprise you to know that it came about when there was no rest, no house, and no king?[i] Perhaps it doesn’t surprise you. Perhaps it surprises you no more than knowing the story of Mary and the angel Gabriel was written down a full generation or two later, at a time when this one whose birth is foretold, this Jesus the Messiah had been executed as an enemy of the state and the church, and this miraculous child John, of the eighty-something year-old Elizabeth, had been beheaded, and when the very structure of Jewish life that serves as the backdrop to this story had been undercut, when there was once again no rest, no house, and no king. What is it about this hope of ours, that it seems to thrive when things are unfinished, that it seems to flourish most in trouble, in suffering, and in need? What is it about this mysterious faith of ours, that it is strongest, according to Romans, when revealed after long ages of being kept secret? What is it about this love of ours, that it is made perfect in weakness? Scott AndersonIsaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 † Psalm 126 † 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 † John 1:6-8, 19-28
A video version of this sermon can be found here. Just about every Christmas season I return to W. H. Auden’s Christmas long poem “For the Time Being.” I’m not entirely sure why. It isn’t a particularly efficient or even rewarding exercise even as I am drawn to sputtering along in my reading. I do suspect it holds a certain inspiration for me, or at least the promise of it that I am at any moment apt to tap into a reserve of insight and understanding. Perhaps my motivation is wrapped up in some faulty psychology that supposes because it is thick, because it is hard work to understand that it must be worth it. I do get that possibility, so you armchair psychologists can just sit on your hands for the moment. In fact, I think it is the other side of that psychological coin that has something more to do with this strange Advent season in this extraordinary “coronatide” time. It’s the audacity of this time that captures me. It’s the foolishness of this faith that imagines we can mobilize the machinery of the hope required to cut a path through mountains and valleys to make the way straight and wide, when it all seems so, well, not that, so anything, but passable. Foolish indeed. Faith, like love, is never easy. Scott AndersonIsaiah 64:1-9 † Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19 † 1 Corinthians 1:3-9 † Mark 13:24-37
A video version of this sermon can be found here. There is no less light in the world. I understand this may be difficult for us to imagine on these days in our Pacific Northwest when light seems to be such a scarce commodity. The comments began soon after we said goodbye to Daylight Saving Time and gave ourselves that extra hour of sleep—a brief reward for the inundation of darkness that now affords us only 8 hours and change of this dripping, gray miasma we now call daylight. If you’re among the small group who still commute farther than from your bedroom to your, I don’t know, bedroom, you probably go to work and come home in this blanket of darkness. It can be overwhelming. Especially so this year. But, unless you believe in a flat earth, and the heavens as some kind of a literal canopy above it, we know this is simply a matter of perspective. There is no less light in the world. We are simply spending more time in the shadows these days as our earth has begun that part of its travels around the sun that radiates more energy and light on the southern hemisphere than the northern. It’s a matter of perspective. The sun shines just as bright. The light is there, along with the dark. It always is. It’s just that we don’t get the same angle on it that we do in those July days when the light lasts for 16 hours and the darkness is almost non-existent to those of us who go to bed by 10 or wake up after 5. Scott AndersonEzekiel 34:11-24 † Psalm 100 † Ephesians 1:15-23 † Matthew 25:31-46 A video version of this meditation can be found here. It’s all hindsight. All of it. No one was doing what they were doing in the story because they thought they were doing it “unto Christ.” They were just doing it. The surprise was that it was, or that it is the Holy One in those who were vulnerable. And everyone was surprised!. Everyone was surprised that this would be the thing that would set them apart—right from left, sheep from goats. When did we see you hungry or thirsty, or a stranger or with no clothes on your back, or locked up?  Scott AndersonZephaniah 1:7, 12-18 † Psalm 90:1-12 † 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 † Matthew 25:14-30
A video version of this sermon can be found here. The kingdom of God, the reign of God, the world in which God’s will is done is like this: a man going on a journey summoned his servants and entrusted his considerable riches to them. We’ve talked about this parable before. It is a sticky one—one of those that can be read in multiple ways depending on how you identify the players, depending on the way you read it. And there may be no right answer to it, except the one that gets us closer to the deep truth of God’s life in the world and in us in this moment in time, which is probably the one that disturbs and challenges us the most. I suspect we know the traditional reading. This is a story about the importance of doing something with the gifts and the talents we have been given. And this is true, isn’t it? It is important. The master to whom the talents belong is God, or maybe Jesus, and the servants are the disciples—us, you and me—who take what we’ve been given and use it for good, or don’t perhaps to our peril. Paul kind of sums up this idea in his letter to the Thessalonians: “Encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.” Make investments in God’s ways, in other words, and be cautious when God’s ways challenge those ways to which we have grown accustomed. There’s much to be drawn from this, and some difficulties as well. How, for example, do we reconcile this callous or even cruel absentee owner for whom forgiveness seems to be a rare commodity, who seems to take delight in enriching those who are already rich and throwing the one who already had little into the darkness—how do we reconcile this image with the God who in Jesus is love and justice equally? How do we imagine that this one who gave his life for the sake of the world could be so hard-hearted? Scott AndersonAmos 5:18-24 † Psalm 70 † 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 † Matthew 25:1-13 A video version of this sermon can be found here. Keep awake! That’s the message Jesus draws from this murky story in Matthew right before the parable of the talents which we’ll see next Sunday. There’s all this detail in the story—a bridegroom, but no bride anywhere to be found; lamps (which are really torches) and oil. Five brought oil, the other five didn’t. It’s not that they didn’t bring enough, they just didn’t bring any, or maybe they didn’t have any. And apparently there’s an all-night oil shop open somewhere down the road. All ten bridesmaids--virgins actually, fall asleep, by the way. All of them. The bridegroom arrives late, seriously late, and five make it into the party and five are shut out. And Jesus tells his listeners to keep awake.
Scott AndersonDeuteronomy 34:1-12 † Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17 † 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8 † Matthew 22:34-46
Back in 2000 my daughter Claire and I went camping with a dear friend and his daughter. The next year another dear college friend and his daughters joined us. Soon enough, my son Peter was old enough and he started coming, building what became a summer camping tradition that lasted some 15 years—essentially through the school years of all our kids. The annual July drive to our camping trip in Mount Rainier National Park was always a highlight of the year. We hiked all through the park and in nearby locations. We celebrated meals together and spent long hours in conversation around the fire. We created memories that shaped us and will outlast my lifetime. The kids are older now. Half of them are married and have started their own families. There was one year, one conversation I was reminded of this week. We had been going to the same campground—Ohanapecosh in the Southeast corner of the Park—for at least a decade and we dads began to wonder if we ought to change it up a bit. So we proposed the idea of a new location, a new adventure for the following year to the kids. Before we could even finish the sentence, and with one voice they all cried out: “No! It’s tradition!” Now, let me try to explain the impact of this on me in the moment. |
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