Scott AndersonExodus 14:19-31 † Psalm 114:1-9 † Romans 14:1-12 † Matthew 18:21-35
Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Perhaps I should stop talking and just sit down. Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Thus ends the reading of the word. Thus, ends the sermon. Why do we pass judgment? There is plenty here in this simple question. Just take time to reflect on it, live in it. “Explore the space,” as Christopher Walken says in one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits. If we were to do this, and this alone, to consider our quick path to judgment, it would be time well spent. Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? That’s what the slave did to the other slave in the parable, isn’t it? He decides not to forgive the debt he is owed, despite having just experienced forgiveness that has given his own life back to him. It is worth pointing out, I think, the extremes captured in the amounts that are forgiven and not forgiven. The master forgives his servant a debt of ten thousand talents, while the servant fails to forgive his brother a debt of one hundred denarii. Let’s do the math. A talent, as the footnote in the pew bibles notes, is worth “more than fifteen years’ wages of a laborer” while the denarius was “the usual day’s wage.” In other words, the first servant has been forgiven a debt equivalent to 50 million days of a salary for a laborer, while he cannot find his way to forgiving a debt equal to a salary of 100 days of labor—4 months or so. We are talking, in other words, about a proportion of 500,000 to one.
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Scott AndersonGenesis 45:1-15 † Psalm 33 † Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32 † Matthew 15:10-28
Mother Teresa used to say, “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.” I don’t know what you think of this. It strikes me at first, like a claim from a more innocent time. It seems inadequate in the face of the recently amplified voices of white supremacy, of oppression and intolerance and hatred—perhaps most unnervingly, from the occupant of the White House whose role is supposedly to speak with a moral voice, to represent all the people, not an intolerant few. It seems inadequate in the echo of extremist voices reviving the language of racial purity and ethnic intolerance. It seems inadequate given these beliefs led to the systematic murder of 7 million Jews and people of color by the Nazi Party of Germany—of people with physical and mental disabilities, and of lesbians and gays and transgendered people who were only trying to be their true selves. It seems inadequate given the long history of slavery, of overt and covert oppression and malicious intimidation of people of African ancestry these past 400 years. It seems inadequate given the ebb and flow of government policies over the life of our troubled nation that have further privileged the interests of the already protected insiders. Perhaps a quick reminder of legislative history in the United States might help us to keep things in context here:[i] Scott Anderson
Franklin and a team of researches visited the scorched slopes of Mount St. Helens after the volcano exploded with the force of multiple atomic bombs in 1980. William Dietrich tells the now familiar story in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Final Forest.[i] The blast laid trees over like a giant comb, burning off the needles and covering the mountainsides with logs like matted brown hair. Ash covered the duff of the forest floor. Humans and large animals caught in the blast were suffocated and roasted. But scientists were surprised at how many small creatures and plants survived the searing heat and began immediately to repair the ecological fabric. Fireweed poked through the ash. Ants scuttled across the gray powder. Gophers burrowed to the surface, beginning to mix the old soil with the new deposits. Insects and seed began to blow across the moonscape. Maggie BreenEzekiel 37:P1-14 † Psalm 130 † Romans 8:6-11 † John 11:1-45
You’ve maybe heard me say this before, but I loved fairy tales as a child. They contained for me a power, a kind of terrible fascination, that I have revisited as an adult. I am pretty sure that big bad wolves, wild hags, shoemaker elves, ugly ducklings, good fairies, taking animals, and savvy children abandoned in forests populated my childhood dreams. They provided for me very good company. Now I am not talking about the “handsome prince rescuing the helpless damsel” kind of fairy tale, although those are always fun too. I am talking about the fairy tales that help us look at the terror and the hope in this life. I remember a long list of little stories – sometimes called fairy-tales, folk-tales, or wonder-tales. Maybe you know some of these. |
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