Blogging Towards Sunday, October 28^th       

Exodus: 14:1-31 & 15:19-21a

The Exodus.  This is the big climax (or is it?) of the story of the Exodus the Israelites are free.  Chased out of Egypt, they pillage their former slave masters.  They leave not just free, but masters of their own future.  But quickly Pharaoh changes his mind, and the greatest army of earth sets off in pursuit of a ragtag bunch of slaves hobbling along with their cripple and lame, their livestock and unleavened bread.  And just as quickly the Israelites change their mind about the nature and purpose of God.  They seem to lose faith.  Is this story just history, myth, good story or does it have something to say about the way that we live and an answer to our own metaphysical questions about the existence and activity of God?

Blogging Towards Sunday October 21st

Blogging Towards  Sunday, October 21^st        

 Exodus 12:1-42

Passover: it’s the beginning of months, the religious festival that marks time from the freedom of Israel from slavery, it’s the celebration of the experience of God’s redemptive action – it turns the past into a celebration of the future.  As Christians we don’t necessarily follow, observe or celebrate Passover – and yet it’s more than just history, more than just the cultural background of the world of Jesus.  It’s also an invitation to us as seekers of God, followers of the teachings of Jesus, and practitioners seeking our center in the Spirit.  Passover is an invitation for all those who follow God to live with a new sense of time, a new sense of social relationships and identity, and to have a new relationship to the past and the future.

Blogging Towards Sunday, October 14^th       

 Exodus 6:9-13; 7:8-11:10; 12:29-36

Freedom: it’s the bedrock value of our national identity.  Freedom is also at the heart of what it means to be a follow of Jesus the Christ, who promised, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” (John 8:32)  And yet how often do we feel truly free – to see and be who we are?  Are our actions determined by our past, our psychological baggage, family systems, our racial and cultural identity, our educational experience, and our faith journey?  Exodus wrestles with the metaphysical question: From what are we free?  What are we given freedom to do?  Can you have freedom and yet have constraints, rules or limits? It’s not just a question for adolescents. We are faced with our freedom in terms of the decisions we’ve made, or not made, in our lives, in our relationships, and the paths for action that seem to lay before us.

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for Sunday, September 30^th      

 Exodus 5:1-9,15-6:9

Is God really there for and with us?  If so, shouldn’t life be easier?  Shouldn’t we not suffer?  Since we still suffer, struggle and live in strife, does that mean that our hope is misplaced in God? That God is unloving?  Or that God is impuissant to save, protect and heal us?  Theologians call this existential question that of THEODICY:  is God good?  Is God all powerful?  If so why is there evil?  If not, how can God be God?  Today’s passage tells the return of Moses to Egypt, his initial confrontation with Pharaoh, and what seemed to be a great failure in the eyes of the enslaves Israelites.  The Israelites only see the bricks their made to make.  God sees something else: the bricks with which God wants to build a new land, a new people, a new hope.

Blogging Towards Sunday, September 23^rd     

  Exodus 3:1-22

What’s in a name?  That’s the question with which today’s scripture from Exodus wrestles.  Always a propos, the question seems even more poignant in this time of increasingly vehement and violent religious discourse, political action and violent extremism.  All the religions of the world lift up compassion, justice and peace.  And yet multiple mysterious things are done in the name of divinities: the storming of an embassy in Libya, the Japanese invasion and occupation of the Korean Peninsula, the blockade of the West Bank, the enslavement of Africans, the Crusades, the 9/11 bombing, the Spanish Inquisition and the cold blood murders of medical workers who perform abortions.  It’s easy for us to look at actions taken in the name of other gods and traditions as see how they are twisted, and yet we have to admit that in our own faith community tragically destructive things have been done in the name of the God we serve and follow.  So where does that leave us?  If we claim to do things in the name of God, are we religious extremists?  When we pray in the name of Jesus of Nazareth are we intolerant activists?  If we don’t invoke the name of God in our actions, decisions and talk are we denying our faith out of the fear of being labeled extremists or even terrorists?

Blogging Towards Sunday, September 16^th     

  Exodus1:1-2:22

“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.” – J. R. R. Tolkien

We’re starting a new series wrestling with the story of the Exodus.  The underlying theme of the book is about freedom.  That God frees us from slavery for covenant life together.  As you read that sentence, and as we work through the text in the coming weeks our guiding interpretive question is what does that mean?  Then?  Now? 

We also should ask ourselves How does this mean?  “Unlike the recipes in a cookbook or the instructions in an elementary arithmetic book, there are meanings and truths that simply are not sayable in a series of simples sentences.  Indeed the richer the meanings, and the more important the truths, the more difficult it is to say them simply in the spirit of one plus one equals two.  Therefore, poets, and storytellers, too, resort to a variety of strategies for using words in ways that will catch and embody meanings and truths that we may all have felt and believed to be real or at least hoped against hop might be so, but find it difficult to express.” – J. Gerald Janzen in Exodus.

Blogging Towards Sunday, September 9^th     

  Mark 16:1-8

We’ve been reading through the gospel of Mark on Sundays for several months.  Today we arrive at the end of the story.  It’s either the worst ending to a story, or a great ending that’s actually a re-beginning.  Most Biblical scholars esteem that the original ending of the gospel concludes with verse 8 (our proposed reading), advancing that the early church added what we call verses 9 – 20 in order to smooth the rough edges of the story of the women who remain mute, passive and afraid.

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for Sunday, August 19^th    
Mark 14:32-72

"The killing of Jesus, however incidental to the tasks of governance for the Roman and Jewish authorities, masks the worst in human brutality. Regimes do this to people in the name of all kinds of claims to common good and, not least, to the furtherance of peace. People do this to people, when anger and fear conspire to suppress love and goodness. We all do it. Mark's is an 'in your face'  account of the killing of love."

– William Loader

Theological Themes:

This week’s passage in our ongoing reading of Mark, is commonly read on Good Friday, as the passion narrative.  Other texts habitually read with it are Isaiah 50:1-9 and Philippians 2:5-10.  We reflect and celebrate the paradoxical horror of Good Friday because, as the world continues to turn upside down, Jesus is still at work transforming lives, transforming governments, and transforming societies.  That’s the theological affirmation underneath this story of suffering, desertion and ultimately death and finally new life.

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for Sunday, August 5^th   
  Mark 14:12-31

As we finish our reading of Mark’s gospel, we arrive at the climactic end (and re-beginning) of the story of Jesus.  I’m struck by the way in which the passage for today, commonly called “the Last Supper” is presented as customary, normal, the established way of celebrating the Passover: the ritual meal that creates community and names the love of a God who delivered the Hebrews from slavery in Ancient Egypt.  Jesus takes this “normal” or “customary” way of explaining God, naming God’s love and experiencing God’s freedom and reinterprets it, turning it upside down and right side up.  His interpretation of the meal is sandwiched between two stories of betrayal, denial and desertion.  His love – best summarized in the offering of the communion meal – seems to be ineffective, not stopping betrayal, but preceding it; not preventing denial but rather naming it.  Is the Love of Jesus that we invoke, proclaim and ask for merely a metaphor?  Is it just pretty words intended to make us feel better in our own betrayals and suffering?  How can it be true when Jesus seems to be a failure more than a victor in the story of the cross?

Questions for going deeper 
with the Scriptures for Sunday, July 22^nd   

  Mark 14:1-11

Show and Tell.  That’s both the game and the expression that keeps bouncing around in my mind while I wrestle with this text from Mark’s gospel telling.  Increasingly it seems that the best way to talk about faith in Jesus is to show it – to live what he taught, practice what he preached, draw close to the people, needs and purposes to which he drew close.  It seems like there are too many words – too many things spoken and said – in our culture inundated with words, images, status updates, tweets and programs.  What we hunger for is an encounter, human interaction.  And yet while a picture says a thousand words, and an encounter can be expressed in a novel – words still are vital, the bedrock of how we communicate, share what we know and name what we live.  Where is the balance between showing and telling faith in our pluralistic postmodern image inundated society?

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for Sunday, July 15^th   

  Mark 13:1-37

Apocalypse.  The word has many connotations for us. Even more in this year of 2012 seen as auspicious and foreboding in the Mayan Calendar which stops at it.  Our current pop culture imagination is seemingly obsessed by it.  We can see that in the ever popular Zombie catastrophes that have become the major theme of many movies, shows and books.

Is it merely a way to sell books, products and movies or is it a deeper fascination or fear of where our world is headed in the sociological jungle of the Arab Spring, deepening technological dependence, growing social isolation and the ever-widening global market? Often times apocalyptic talk can push towards a fight or flight mentality: fight to preserve the purity of what we’ve known, or a flight or retreat waiting for an escape or something better.  The word literally means uncovering, as in revealing something that was hidden or obscured.  Quite different than the popular and despairingly hopeless visions of total annihilation and mayhem.

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for Sunday, July 8^th    

  Mark 12:28-44

Greatness.  It’s what many in our society strive for, on a certain level it’s the American dream.  But what makes a person great? Wealth?  Accomplishments? Relationships?  Possessions?  Achievements? Diplomas? Having your wedding announced in the New York Times Sunday edition?  The encounters in today’s passage wrestle with the notion of greatness in Jesus’ day.  The example was the religious leaders.  Those that weren’t great were the everyday poor.  Things don’t seemed to have changed much, except that in on our culture today rare is it that the religious leaders define greatness with their example.  What makes the church so great? – at least historically?  And why do we struggle with that today?

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for Sunday, June 17^th  

  Mark 12:18-12:34

Love.  It’s both a noun and a verb.  Yet often times it seems like in the church we’re better at talking about it as a concept, subject or noun as opposed to actively, creatively and imaginatively doing it.  As I wrestle with the passage for this Sunday I’m struck by the two encounters including in the proposed reading.  The first is a hypothetical situation posed as a philosophical conundrum by the religious rulers of the day (the Sadducees).  Jesus responds directly, bluntly telling them that their question isn’t the correct one to be asking.  Rather than dealing in hypotheticals, they should be living in reality, not wondering who is the neighbor they should love, but actually practicing what they preach.  I read that and wonder how it interrogates me and challenges my life?  How do I practice love more as a noun than as a verb?  And is it an either/or situations or a both/and one?

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for 
Sunday, June 10^th  

  Mark 11:27-12:17

Authority.  That’s the key issue underneath the scriptures that we wrestle with this morning.  The religious leaders of the day are challenged and confused by the authority that Jesus seems to have.  Their antagonism seems to come from the fact that he has taken a different path then they have.  He’s not studied like them.  He doesn’t speak like them.  He’s outside of their sphere of influence.  Are they jealous?; insecure?; threatened?; close-minded?  What we see throughout the text is the fear the leaders have of the crowd (11:32 & 12:12).  The leaders are politically isolated, fearful of the very people they purportedly serve.  As I study the text I find myself wondering how I – how we as a faith community – are like these leaders – out of touch with the crowd, the people on the street, the larger population? How are we stuck in our own box and unable to think outside of it?  How do we understand that in a time of great, radical and overwhelming change that impacts us in terms of society, technology, relationships, communication and life-style?  How do we act as coherent, authentic followers of Jesus in a world that is increasingly pluralistic?

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for Sunday, June 3^rd 

  Mark 11:12-26

Prayer.  It’s something that we all invoke, even if we claim to be spiritual but not religious.  But what is prayer all about?  Is it us expressing our needs, hopes and fears?  Is it God listening to us?  Is it an energy that we plug into through centering actions of silence and mindfulness? Is it a way in which we relinquish our will and accept God’s, connecting with the work that God is already about in our world?  Today’s scripture points to all these facets of prayer and also offers a deep challenge to an exclusive vision that God only listens to prayers done in one particular spot.  Common in Jesus’ day, and mostly foreign to us, this notion of having a privileged or exclusive relationship with God still makes up part of the religious perspective we move in.  How do you experience prayer?  How do we as a community?  How is God calling us to move beyond our expectations, to being a house of prayer in a deeper and wider way?

Blogging Towards Pentecost Sunday,  May 27^th

  Mark 11:1-11 (Crowning the King),

Acts 2:1-21 (what does this mean?),

& Acts 2:42-47 (the gospel embodied in community)

 Pentecost is a unique day in the life of the Church Calendar in which it is connoted by the color red, (remember our Godly Play lesson from 2 weeks ago?)  Red is the color of passion, strong feelings, fire.  It evokes the heat and passion of fire similar to the passionate purpose and transformative presence of God’s Spirit when it moves in the world.  Pentecost is a reminder that God calls the Church to a risky endeavor, to engage the world, in the world, to declare in word and action that God loves the world and that we most know God through the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.  If that’s the meaning of the birth-day of the Church, I find myself wondering what kind of legacy we’ve been leaving as the church?  When folks encounter our church on College Avenue, or when the wonder about the Church in general, do they imagine a community of people making meaning in life together around a shared core value that we most know, experience God and grow in faith through knowing Jesus & practicing what he preached?

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for Sunday: May 20th

  Mark 10:32-52

The Way of Jesus is different than the way of the world.  Today’s scripture point to that mystery, which supersedes any discussion that merely reduces faith to a particular set of morals or ethical actions.  The Way of Jesus leads to and through the cross, and then out of the victory of the resurrection and the paradox of the empty tomb.  Today’s passage closes the center literary nugget of Mark’s gospel which began with the healing of an anonymous blind man in 8:22, echoed and inverted in today’s healing encounter of another blind man Bartimaeus in 10:46-52.  The Way of Jesus moves us from anonymity, to relationship with God through Christ.  In that movement we confess, naming Jesus as the Christ and in the life-giving and universe-transforming love of that relationship we too receive our true name and discover our identity as servants of the Resurrected One.

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for Sunday, 
May 6^th   Mark 10:17-31| Salvation as a Gift

We often look for answers, but maybe it’s our questions that most define and shape us as human beings. What defines us?  Is it our jobs?; zip code?; possessions?; faith?; class?; ethnicity?; choices?  Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “Commitment is an act, not a word.”  In his existential viewpoint he echoes to a certain extent what Jesus is getting at in his encounter with the young rich ruler in today’s section of Mark.  Philosophy grew out of the essential human question as posed by the ancient Greek Socrates: What is a good life? How does one live one?  Can one even live a good life? Does the good we do come from a greater good?  Do we have to be religious, or spiritual, to have a good life? Do we need to be saved from something?  If so, what? It gets at the fundamental heart of Christian faith.

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for Sunday: April 29^th

  Mark 10:1-16 | Bonhoeffer’s notion of Costly Grace

If you've been to Frog Park in Oakland's Rockridge district this past week you've seen some major construction and trench-digging emerge.  I go there for dog park breaks with my dog David during the day.  Throughout the week I reflected upon the marks that appeared on the street, sidewalks, even the bushes indicating what was below.  It was striking to realize how much is down there, and how ignorant I am of its presence - and exactly how important it all is to and in day to day life.  I think this week's passage is like those markings, pointing to what lies below in our identities, our relationships and our day to day life.

Blogging Towards Sunday April 22^nd

Mark 9:38-50

A common joke among pastors goes like this: “If it weren't for the people, I'd love my church!"   While irreverently funny, it points to the true challenge of following the teachings of Jesus:  other people.  It’s easy (or at least seems easier) to work to love God, as Jesus said, with all our intelligence, passion and life-energy.  It’s other people that are difficult.  There’s a reason that Jesus claimed that anyone can love their friends and family.  What’s truly revolutionary is to actively love your enemies in a way that transforms us, them and the world.