April 14, 2022 (Maundy Thursday)
If you had twenty-four hours left to live, how would you use it? For almost everyone, the answer would come down to making sure every moment could be spent with loved ones—telling them all the things you ever wanted to tell them, and making sure they knew just how much you loved them. Some people are given the opportunity to know (to some extent) how long they have, and they get to do just that. In tonight’s gospel, we see just how Jesus chose to use the time he had left before he would go, as he said, where his disciples couldn’t go. This is an emotional scene, where Jesus has his last supper with the disciples who had followed him for around three years at this point. He needs to tell them everything that’s left, making sure they have the right takeaways from his teachings. He prays for them, and he offers all the comfort he can muster to get them through the next few days and all that would come. He knows he doesn’t have a lot of time, and maybe it’s for that reason that he takes the time to show them, rather than just tell them, what the most important part of their identity as his followers will be.
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April 3, 2022
A few years back, Annie and I were in a grocery store picking up a few things for the week’s meals. But one thing that stopped me short while we were on our way to getting some kind of vegetable or other was a pallet of soft drinks. Well, one particular kind of soft drink. Sun Drop. Now, I don’t know how many of y’all have had Sun Drop, but I was genuinely surprised to find it outside of the South. And this might sound weird to some, but Sun Drop has a special place in my heart. See, my grandma had this cabinet. It was six foot high cabinet (which is hilarious because she wasn’t even five feet tall with her hair) that was filled, top to bottom, with exactly two varieties of soft drink: Cheerwine (which I’m certain y’all have never heard of) and Sun Drop. And to this day, if I catch a whiff of the sugary lemon-lime carbonation that is Sun Drop’s scent, I am immediately transported back to my grandma’s kitchen. Scent and memory are tied together. March 27, 2022
When we experience some kind of big or momentous change as human beings, we like to mark it in some way: a party, a ceremony, even a moment that acknowledges the transition that’s happening. We do it every single year on New Year’s Eve with a big party. And in a couple short months, many of us will be marking the transition out of school with graduation. Opening up a new business or starting a new construction project often has some kind of ribbon-cutting ceremony! We celebrate the transition from one life to the next when we come together for a baptism, the ritual washing away of the old sinful person and the birth of a new child of God. And we also mark the not-so-happy transitions in life as well with some kind of acknowledgment. The bittersweet moment of moving to a new place might be marked with a get-together. A bad year and a closing business has a gathering to mourn and remember what happened. And of course we mark the death of a loved one with a funeral—a time when we remember who they were and talk about the hope we have. We mark these transitions with rituals, ceremonies, some kind of remembrance. March 20, 2022
One of the things I was taught way back in elementary school math class was this peculiar rule about shapes. A square is nothing more than a rectangle with all sides being equal. So, technically speaking, all squares are rectangles. However, and this was an important part of the lesson, not all rectangles are squares. It’s an extremely basic concept and somehow it perfectly fits the lesson Jesus teaches in the first half of our gospel reading this morning. Come with me on this. We hear about these two awful, tragic events—first, about some Galileans who were murdered on the orders of Pilate, possibly during worship since their blood mingled with sacrifices; and second, some Jerusalemites who were crushed by a collapsing tower. The senselessness of tragedy has always been something we as human beings have tried desperately to apply some kind of sense to. We need a reason. When bad things happen, why do they happen? The explanation Jesus was confronting—an explanation that, by the way, is still far too prevalent today—is that God was punishing these people for some kind of sin they committed. If bad things happen to you, it must mean that you sinned. But not all rectangles are squares. March 13, 2022
When I was in elementary school, there were a few things I and my friend group took just a little too seriously: winning footraces at recess, which Pokemon cards were the best to collect, where to sit on the bus, and pinky promises. Y’all remember pinky promises right? It was an ironclad agreement that whatever was promised would absolutely, under pain of death, never be broken. Of course, making sure that people follow what they say they’re going to do doesn’t go away as we get older. We consider someone’s word to be really, really important; and someone who keeps their word is worth getting a promise from. Making sure others keep their promises goes way back, to the covenant we see God strike with Abram in our first reading. Covenants weren’t something unique to Israel. There’s evidence of covenants all over the Ancient Near East. A covenant, basically, was an ancient contract in the days before there were law courts and things like that to make sure people did what they promised. The Genesis reading puts it pretty clearly what it looked like to make a covenant. The part where Abram cuts those animals in two? That’s a well-documented part of ancient covenants. It’s where the Hebrew expression comes from—“to cut a covenant.” |
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