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...

February 25, 2024 – Second Sunday of Lent Focus Scriptures: Romans 4:13-25 and Mark 8:31-38 Covenants of Life Our faith, active trust in God, is central to our lives as Christians. When we have faith in God and faith that Jesus Christ is who he said he is – the son of God, The Way, The Truth, and The Life – we are entering into a sacred covenant of life that makes us understand why Jesus Christ came into the world in the first place. There are five central covenants on which our faith is built, covenants in the Bible going back to the covenant with Noah that we discussed with the children last week. From there, we move to the covenant we heard about this morning, God’s covenant with Abraham, a covenant that said he would be the father of many nations due to his faithfulness. From there we move to the Mosaic covenant. God gave the Israelites the law in the desert after leading them out of Egypt. God said, “I will be your God, and you will be my people.” And from this law, we s...

February 18, 2024 - First Sunday of Lent Focus Scripture: Mark 1:9-15 Wilderness and Wild Beasts “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for 40 days, tested by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him.” These two sentences from the briefest of the gospels tell us much. They describe the relationship among the persons of God, they show and foreshadow sacrifice, and they hint at the challenges that our Lord and Savior endured to do his work, that which we will observe and celebrate six weeks from today. These two sentences and their images also give us an idea of how God is with us and works in us today. Let’s first take a moment to consider the contrast of events in this passage. Jesus is baptized by John in the Jordan. Then God speaks saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Then, in the very next sentence, we are told that the Holy Sprit immediately compelled Jesus – drove J...

Focus Scripture: Mark 9:2-9 February 11, 2024 - Transfiguration Sunday and Scout Sunday Clarify and Prepare Sometimes, we need something special, significant, and memorable to give us the clarity we need to prepare for what is to come. A health scare might get someone to cut the junk food and go for the salads. A walk around the neighborhood might look more compelling than more time on the couch. Paying off a large debt and realizing the interest charges paid might get someone to think twice before doing it again. Even in school, a poor grade on a quiz might get us to buckle down and study hard for the final exam or to put in extra effort on the big project. The reality is that we have tons of information coming at us every day, but not all of it is significant or memorable. We remember the memorable, everything else is background noise. Today is Transfiguration Sunday, the gospel lesson is found in the 9 th chapter of Mark, more than halfway through this concise, 16-cha...

Focus Scriptures: 1 Corinthians 9:16-23 and Mark 1:29-39 February 4, 2024 – 5 th Sunday after Epiphany Just One More Our Christian faith is one of action. God expects us to do God’s work. God works in us, among us, and through us. Christianity requires effort. Both the 1 Corinthians and Mark scriptures this morning feature a driving force: the motivation to fulfill the mission for which one was created. Jesus is explicit: “That is what I came out to do” (v.38). Paul’s message is similar, as it should be: “I do it all for the sake of the gospel so that I might become a partner in it” (v.23). This statement from Paul is the conclusion to the text we just heard. It concludes his explanation that he will become as a Jew for the Jews, a Gentile for the Gentiles. In this description of Paul’s work, we see that he is willing to meet people wherever they are physically and spiritually to bring them to Christ. He wants to save some. God inspires us to action if we listen. In the ea...