A Fresh Perspective

    L ast week’s Lectionary text from the Gospel of Luke was the call of the first disciples in 5:1-11. From 5:12 through 6:16 Luke gathers together several controversy and call stories. The story that immediately precedes the Lectionary text of Luke 6:17-27 (Sixth Sunday after Epiphany) is the story of Jesus designating twelve of his disciples as apostles. Beginning at 6:20 and extending through 6:49 is a section of teaching that is somewhat parallel to Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. Luke omits several teachings that are in Matthew, though some of these teachings show up in Luke in different settings in abbreviated form. Luke inserts some unique material and in a few places the material appears in a different sequence than Matthew’s version. Luke 6:17-19 sets the context for the teaching that follows. In Matthew Jesus delivers this teaching on a mountain; in Luke Jesus teaches on a level place. The audience according to Luke includes the twelve apostles, a larg...

On the church calendar, and I don’t mean our church calendar that appears in your Connections, I mean the ecumenical church calendar that follows the Christian year as reflected in the Revised Common Lectionary, today is called Reign of Christ Sunday. The question I want to address today is asked in the title: What does the reign of Christ look like? What is it about? What are the primary characteristics of the reign of Christ? These are very important considerations. In our text today Pilate questions Jesus about his kingship. And in response Jesus says, “My kingdom is not from this world.” What does that mean? I’m sure we all realize that words have multiple meanings. A trunk could be a box-like container, or it could be the back part of your car that holds your luggage, or it could be attached to a tree. What the word means is determined by the context in which it is used. Biblical words are no different. Consider the word “world.” When Jesus says my kingdom is not of this wo...

This text is a religious text in a sacred book. Religious texts are metaphorical texts. All of them. That doesn’t mean there are no memories or historical echoes – there surely are. However, historical references or allusions are secondary to the main purpose of sacred texts. I don’t know (and the scholars don’t know either) exactly what pre-modern people in the days of an enchanted universe believed about demonic possession. Maybe it was then like it is now. Maybe there were a number of different views. Who knows? This text has relevance to us as a proclamation of the transforming power of God. I said last week that the kingdom of God – (which I like to call the kin-dom of God, because it’s really about relationships) – the kin-dom of God has to do with the dynamic power of love at work in our world to transform us individually and to transform the systems, organizations, and institutions of society. In today’s Gospel reading we see the power of the kingdom, which is the power o...

In the summer of 1942, before the civil rights movement, Clarence Jordan, a Ph.D in New Testament, a Southern Baptist whom Southern Baptists came to hate, on 440 acres of worn out farm land in southwest Georgia launched what he called a “demonstration plot” for the kingdom of God. He named his experiment Koinonia Farm. The Greek word koinonia is the word used to depict the Christian community described in the fourth chapter of the book of Acts that shared their resources and held everything in common so that no one in the community did without. I suppose Jordan wouldn’t have had much opposition if it was an all white community. But this was in interracial community where whites and blacks lived and worked as equals, as family.   Being a Baptist he was often invited to preach in little Baptist churches, that is, until they heard his message of equality for all people. Then he was rarely invited back.  After one sermon where he bemoaned and denounced the country’s practice ...

Writer Robert Roberts tells about a fourth grade class that played “balloon stomp.” In “balloon stomp” a balloon is tied to every child’s leg, and the object of the game is to pop everyone else’s balloon while protecting your own. The last person with an intact balloon wins. It’s a game rooted in the philosophy of “survival of the fittest.” In this particular fourth grade class balloons were relentlessly targeted and destroyed. A few of the less aggressive children hung shyly on the sidelines and, of course, their balloons were among the first to go. The game was over in a matter of seconds. The winner, the one kid whose balloon was still intact was the most disliked kid in the room.  But then, says Roberts, a second class was brought into the room to play the game, only this time it was a class of mentally challenged children. They too were each given a balloon. They were given the same instructions as the other group, and the same signal to begin the game. This time,...