And now for something a little different…most of my sermons tend to be general comments on humanity, where each of us appreciate part of the stream, the common life shared with each of our brothers and sisters, or I preach about facets of God’s nature or mission—God’s love, God’s love expressed through Jesus, Jesus stretching us, but all in all my preaching tends to be in a general sort of manner. It may cause you to stretch, but it may not. You may not ever have to exit your comfort zone. You can take what you want from it—you can go deeply, but you are not required to go anywhere. I suppose I do this, because I figure that if you want to go deeply, you probably will; and, also, conversely, nothing much I am going to say is going to persuade you to go deeply if you don’t want…

Somewhere I have a pop psychology book called the Pain of being Human. Each chapter kind of goes through a different issue. I’m not sure that the advice in the book solves anything; the answers are not memorable anyway. Still, it feels very similar to this 10th Chapter of Mark—more human problems….so many human problems. The Gospels not only give the backbone of the human and divine characteristics of Jesus, the Gospels even more so perhaps, confront our human foibles, frailty, and brokenness and help us to be, if anything, maybe a little less annoying, and slightly easier to cohabit the earth with our fellow human beings. What I was most struck with in this Gospel passage is how full people’s lives are with the tediousness of egos. This clearly is not a first world problem, or 21st century problem. This is a human problem. Even if expressed differently across…

Last week we spoke quite a bit about the context of scripture. I heard a lot of feedback about last week’s sermon. I suspect that there remains a general angst about being divorced in the church. We don’t really know what to do with passages around divorce in Scripture. And I tried to offer some reflections that many seem to have found helpful, and I’m glad of that. If last week’s Gospel produced anxiety, this week’s is sure to be a winner. Not everyone is divorced, clearly. However, on Vashon, many people have a lot of wealth, particularly compared to the rest of the country. Even some people who may be poor on Vashon have a lot of wealth compared to the rest of the world. So, this scripture does not go down easy for anyone really. The people involved in Stewardship for the church may be sitting in the…

There are so, so many Gospel passages that are just plain difficult. There are reasons they are difficult. One reason is that the stories are 2000 years old. One reason is that we read them in little snippets, and so we don’t get their overall context. And I’m sure there are other reasons, but the last reason that I want to flag is that they are difficult because we may not like what we hear. This is different than saying we may not like what they say (which may also be true), but we don’t like what we hear. So, clearly we can’t do much about the Gospel being 2000 years old, except to recognize that not everything is timeless. Perhaps intention is timeless, but we need to know what the intention is…. But we can put this passage in context which helps with intention. This portion of the Gospel…

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. My house has mugs from Oddfellows Cafe, which was the cafe in the Elliott Bay Bookstore. (Last I saw, it appears that it did not survive the financial hit of the pandemic.) Still the mugs say, “Words matter.” I think these mugs were first sold when Donald Trump was elected, but the timing is not really essential. Words matter all the time. Words can build up someone, or words can hurt. Words matter. One could view the Epistle of James as entirely rooted around the importance of words and words in action, aka deeds. The Epistle of James’ primary concerns are being cognizant of how we speak, caring for those in distress, and being careful about what we let into our lives. For James, words…

Church of the Holy Spirit, Rev. Ann Saunderson Jeremiah 11:18-20, Psalm 54, James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a, Mark 9:30-37             Good and Holy God join with us in the wonder of this new day.  There is a brightness created in community, an opportunity for illumination. May we each come alive in the word and worship, inviting new vision for our lives and community.  Amen Jeremiah, James and Jesus are our teachers this morning.  Our work is to find the holiness of these lessons from scripture and the holiness of our lives in the here and now.  Each of these biblical teachers offers a strong prophetic voice.   Walter Brueggemann states, “The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the that of the dominant culture around us.” We all have our work cut out for us as we discern who the modern prophets are that…