Faith Scribbling

 March 24 – Palm Sunday Focus Scripture: Mark 11:1-11 Quiet Consideration Hosanna! Hosanna! Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! What must it have been like to be there so long ago? Jesus, who had spent years healing, teaching, and preaching, both in the gentile and Jewish regions, was making his way into Jerusalem. Those who knew their scriptures, the words of the prophets, saw that prophecy was being fulfilled. The prophet Zechariah, in verse 9:9, described this exact scene. “See, your King comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” This Jesus was no threat, no harm, just salvation, righteousness, and peace. This is the Jesus the Bible describes: our Savior who loves us and wants only for us to love God in return. God is our God, and we are God’s people. And for this brief time on a Sunday before Passover, it was so. The people threw down their cloaks and the...

  March 17 – Fifth Sunday of Lent Focus Scripture: John 12:20-33 Thunderclap or Angel Shout? Ignaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician of German descent who lived in the 19 th century. Dr. Semmelweis worked during a time before our modern era when common practices of our time had not yet been adopted. Dr. Semmelweis had a hypothesis that childbed fever, an illness that killed many women, could be reduced. Through his observations, he thought that maternal mortality could be reduced with doctors simply washing their hands. Today, especially after what we experienced and were told to do to slow the spread of COVID, it seems almost impossible to believe that the value of handwashing would be debatable. Today we understand a lot more about germs and how diseases spread. This was not the case in the mid-19 th century. Not only was the idea not understood, it was widely ridiculed. The grim truth is that doctors would move from examining corpses directly to treating women in ...

March 3, 3024 – Third Sunday of Lent Focus Scripture: John 2:13-22 The Work of Worship   “Zeal for your house will consume me.” The people selling livestock and birds set up shop in the wrong place. The money changers, too, did not see this coming: Jesus, Son of God, literally turning the tables on them. Even the disciples were likely surprised by Jesus’s behavior. After all, they had seen this commerce before and would surely have seen it as normal. Until that day. There are several takeaways from this Gospel lesson, all of which we can and should apply in today’s context. Let’s look at four. First, God takes this concept of God’s house seriously. We need look no further than the detailed direction given to the Israelites starting in Exodus 25. The wandering in the desert stopped for a time so all the skilled craftspeople could come together to create the tabernacle. In that context, God told Moses in verses 8 and 9 of that chapter that this would be a “sanctuary” f...