Living Words

Entrusted with the Gospel Galatians 1:18-2:10 by William Klock I will never forget the first day I wore my letterman jacket to school.  High school is full of tribes.  There were the jocks and the nerds, there were the art kids and the shop kids, there were the cool girls and the stoners and the geeks.  And it was obvious which tribe everyone belonged to.  I was always carrying around a book by the likes of Tolkien or Asimov.  And my friends and I avoided the cafeteria at all costs.  Instead, we played Dungeons & Dragons in the library.  I had both feet firmly planted in the nerd tribe.  But I was also on the swim team.  The swim team was one of those sports no one paid attention to.  The only people who knew you were on the swim team were other people on the swim team.  So I remember walking into school that day with my letterman jacket on and everybody stopped and looked, because there I was, one of the nerds dressed like a jock.  But once the surprise wore off, everything fell into place.  Suddenly p

The Son Unveiled in Me Galatians 1:10-17 by William Klock As I was digging around in our crawlspace this week, I found my 1970s Tupperware lunchbox full of my old Star Wars action figures.  Luke Skywalker and Obi Wan and Darth Vader have these neat little light sabres hidden in their arms that slide out when it’s time for them to duel.  At one point I had Luke’s X-wing fighter and I was remembering putting him in the cockpit and flying around the house, looking for the Death Star’s thermal exhaust port.  Luke might have been in the cockpit, but I was going to destroy the Death Star and save the galaxy.  As the week went on I was thinking about our text from Galatians 1and particularly Paul’s background.  I started wondering what sort of games and role-playing young Paul would have engaged in?  Who were his heroes?  Based on what he tells us about himself and from what we know of First Century Judaism and of the Pharisees, it isn’t too hard to imagine Paul playing with his brothers or his neighbourhood frien

People Pleasers or Slaves of the Messiah? Galatians 1:1-10 by William Klock The other day the phone rang.  I answered it and a stranger on the other end asked for Veronica.  I passed the phone to her.  I wondered who it was, but I didn’t get much help from Veronica’s end of the conversation.  It was all “Mmhmm” and “Yes” and “Okay”.  I had no idea who it was or what it was about.  In contrast, while walking to the church I ended up following a woman who was having a very loud conversation with someone on her cell phone.  I couldn’t hear the other person, but I had a pretty good idea what he or she was saying based on the responses this woman was angrily yelling into her phone.  Things like, “Oh!  So I’m being dramatic?” and other things I probably shouldn’t repeat in polite company.  We do this reading between the lines when we read St. Paul’s epistles.  In them we have one side of a conversation and, thankfully, it’s a lot more than “Mmhmm” and “Yes” and “Okay”.  In fact, it’s a lot more like “Oh!  So I’m

A Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity St. Luke 17:11-19 & Galatians 5:16-24 by William Klock Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem, St. Luke tells us.  Making his way there from Galilee for the last time.  And along the way, he passed through the borderlands between Samaria and Galilee.  Galilee was up in the north.  And as much as everyone talked about going “up to Jerusalem”, that was because it was up in the mountains.  Jerusalem, in the territory of Judah, was way down south.  In between was Samaria.  No self-respecting Jew cut through Samaria.  They went around.  Because the Samaritans were filth.  As I said last week, they were the Jews who went wrong to begin with way back when they broke from Judah and established their own illicit temple at Shechem, on Mount Gerizim.  But they’d gone from bad to worse when they intermarried with the pagans then compromised torah with various pagan influences.  The Jews despised the Samaritans (and the Samaritans didn’t feel very kindly towards the Jews i

A Sermon for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity St. Luke 10:23-37 & Galatians 3:16-22 by William Klock Jesus had commissioned seventy disciples to preach the good news throughout the cities and towns of Israel and when they came back to him they were excited.  Wherever the good news went, amazing things happened.  Above everything else, the seventy rejoiced that at the name of Jesus, even demons obeyed.  And Jesus rejoiced with them.  “I know,” he said.  This is what the prophets foretold.  Isaiah and Ezekiel told of their visions in which the Satan fell like lightning from heaven.  It’s happening now.  God’s kingdom is breaking in, God’s light is driving away the darkness, and it is toppling the rulers of this present evil age—and you’re a part of it.  And with that in mind Jesus said to them, “Don’t rejoice that spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” Having your name written in heaven—that meant being written in God’s great book that you belong to him, that

A Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity 2 Corinthians 3:1-11 by William Klock One morning back in my Macintosh technician days my boss walked up and put a resume on my bench.  “Does this look suspicious or is it just me?” he asked.  He pointed to the guy’s work history.  Every one of his previous employers was defunct, but somehow he had the personal email address of every one of his old bosses.  If that wasn’t odd enough, all of them had Yahoo and Hotmail email addresses using similar formats.  It was pretty obvious.  Every one of those email addresses was made up and would just go back to him and he could write his own references. Of course, the whole point of a reference is that someone—who is either known personally or known by reputation—someone else is vouching for you.  They did this in Paul’s world just like we do today.  Jews, especially in the diaspora, would carry letters of recommendation indicating that other Jews could trust them.  In the pagan Greco-Roman world it was common for your

A Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 & St. Luke 18:9-14 by William Klock “Two men went up to the temple to pray,” Jesus said.  The temple was the place where heaven and earth met.  The place where men and women could go to be in the presence of God.  Twice a day the priests would lead the people in prayers, at nine in the morning and at three in the afternoon, but people could go any time to pray and they did.  They still do.  Jews today gather at the Western Wall, not technically the temple, but part of the foundation of the temple complex and all that was left after the Romans brought it all crashing down.  Jews still go there to pray.  Two men climbed the steps to the temple courts to pray.  “One of them,” Jesus said, “was a Pharisee.”  It was perfectly fine to pray at home, but if anyone was going to go and pray at the temple, it would be a Pharisee.  Their “thing” was to live their lives as if they served in the temple.  They weren’t Levites and they weren’t priests,

A Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 & St. Luke 19:41-47 by William Klock Imagine being in the crowds that surrounded Jesus as he made his way through the towns and cities to Jerusalem for the last time.  By now, everyone knew who he was—or, at any rate, who he claimed to be.  There were sceptics.  There were believers.  A lot of people weren’t sure what to believe.  He wasn’t what people expect of the Messiah, but he was doing Messiah things.  He was healing the sick and the blind and the lame.  He cast out demons.  He raised the dead.  He preached good news to the poor.  Think of the crowds in Jericho, the last city before Jesus climbed the mountain to Jerusalem.  The crowds swarmed the road to see him, he’d healed blind Bartimaeus, and that thing with Zacchaeus!  That little twerp had spent his traitorous life selling out to the Romans and ripping everyone off, but since he’d met Jesus he was a new man—even paying everyone back what he’d stolen.  Everywhere that Jesus wen

A Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity St. Luke 16:1-9 by William Klock The Pharisees and the legal experts were grumbling.  They’d come to meet with Jesus, but as Luke tells us, the tax-collectors and the sinners were coming close to Jesus and listening to him.  The Pharisees didn’t associate with people like that and neither should Jesus, if he really was the Messiah.  You can practically hear their teeth grinding as that one Pharisee spits out with disdain and disgust, “This fellow welcomes sinners!  He even eats with them!”  If the kingdom of God was ever going to come, it certainly wasn’t going to come that way! But Jesus, oh so patiently, sat down in response and told them a series of three stories.  We know them well.  He started with a story about a shepherd hunting high and low for a lost sheep.  And then he told a second story about a poor old widow hunting high and low for a precious lost coin.  And he told—you could see the joy on his face as he said it—he told how the shepherd rejoiced

A Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Trinity Romans 8:12-17 & St. Matthew 7:15-21 by William Klock Jesus sat on the mountainside with a great crowd of people spread out all around.  They hung on his every word as he announced the coming of God’s kingdom.  This is what Israel had been waiting for years—for centuries.  Here was the prophet like Moses, promised all the way back in Deuteronomy.  Here he was, like Moses, on the mountain.  But this time, instead of stone tablets with God’s law written on them, Jesus was describing a kingdom in which God’s law of love is inscribed on the hearts of its people—transforming them, setting them right from the inside out.  Just as the law given by Moses described the things that separated the people of God from everyone else—who was in and who was out—Jesus described what the people of God’s new kingdom were to be like—this new people, filled with the very Spirit of God.  But then, knowing how people are and knowing how Israel had fallen so many times in the past, J