Sermons (Page 14)
Nativity of Our Lord
Well, I hope that you weren’t looking for the familiar Christmas Eve story this morning. Today’s gospel is not the Lukan version with Jesus, the angels, and the shepherds. Rather, today is John’s gospel. Unlike Luke and Matthew, John does not write of Jesus’s conception or birth. John doesn’t care about Joseph or Mary as a part of Jesus’s human origins. Instead, Jesus’ beginnings are described in cosmological terms with an emphasis on Jesus as God’s son…
Seventh Sunday of Advent
Well we may still be a week out from Christmas, but today we read the entire Nativity story in the gospel of Matthew! It’s ok if you missed it, it went real fast, just a single verse and not even a whole sentence long. “But he, Joseph, had no marital relations with her, Mary, until she had given birth to a son, and he named him Jesus.” That’s it! That’s the whole story! There’s no away in the mangers, no “no room in the inn for travelers weary” no “certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay” no “angels we have heard on high” Matthew doesn’t even specify what time the birth took place so no “O Holy Night” either. Thank God for Luke, otherwise we’d be really short on Christmas carols…
Sixth Sunday of Advent
Now I could understand a knee jerk reaction to this reading being something like “really, more John the Baptist? We did that last week!” And we did, but last week we talked about him baptizing people in the Jordan River, declaring the kingdom of God to be at hand, that the one more powerful than him who will baptize them all with the Holy Spirit is coming, so get ready! And today we skip about 1/3 of the gospel of Matthew just to continue journeying with John…