Sermon – Lent 2 – Nicodemus’ Story – Rev. Jane McDougle

Gen12:1-4; Ps 121; Rom4:1-5, 13-17; John3:1-17

 

You probably don’t know me, but my name is Nicodemus. I am a powerful, highly respected teacher, and authority on all things Jewish. I spend each day sitting with my fellow members of the Sanhedrin in the Chamber of the Hewn Stones, in the great Temple in Jerusalem.  We know the law backwards and forwards.  We know its nooks and crannies: there is no place for a sinner to hide in the law from us.  The people both revere and fear us:  we have the power to destroy their lives.  And we do so, with our sharply honed, intellectual arguments, our esoteric vocabulary, and our years of collective wisdom.  We live and breathe the law, and take great pride in the intricacies of its workings.

Ash Wednesday – a celebration of impermanence – Rev.Jane McDougle

Isaiah 58:1-12, Ps.103:8-14, 2Cor5:20-6:10, Matt 6;1-6,16-21

The party’s over.  We’ve sung our last ‘Alleluias’. We’ve put away our dancing shoes. We’ve wiped our chins clean of the last of the pancake crumbs, butter and maple syrup. And where are we now?  Peering into those austere forty days of Lent, and contemplating our unarguable finitude in these bodies, on this planet: just about to have black crosses drawn on our foreheads and those words about being dust, and returning to dust.

Sermon: My Yoke is Easy – 13 Mar, Rev. Dr. K. Lehman

Ceramic bowl, English, 1690. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Thursday night, I came home after a meeting, to watch the late news and weather on television, when the first reports and photographs of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami began to arrive. I stayed up past midnight, watching and praying. When I got up on Friday morning to prepare this sermon, I reread the lessons, and this psalm verse jumped out at me. Therefore all the faithful will make their prayers to you in time of trouble* when the great waters overflow, they will not reach them. The tragedy is that many were engulfed, and those in Sendai who managed to survive are left to wonder how they were spared and so many others lost. That is always the question, to which we have no answer. But the faithful continue to make prayers to the God who created earth and sea and humankind. That is the best recourse we have, and the lessons for today say it is reliable.

Sermon: In God’s Arms – 27 Feb, Rev. Dr. K. Lehman

Today’s lesson for us is easily summarized. Be not anxious. Trust in God to provide. Trust that doing God’s will is our best occupation. Fretting is a distracting preoccupation. We are to give ourselves over to God and to life now.

The lessons use images for God that resonate with our earliest experience. As infants, we trusted unreflectively. We luxuriated in parental love and protection, without knowing any other reality. We were indeed safe upon our mother’s breast, upon our father’s knee.

The biblical images reflect common gender role assumptions. God is the provider par excellence, as the good shepherd, who leads Israel home from exile. And God is the nursing mother, cradling her feeding child in her arms. God is as trustworthy as the most caring and attentive parent, only more so. I am reminded of Dame Julian of Norwich, who envisions Christ as our mother, feeding us from his body as a mother gives of herself to feed her child.